Social support for healthy eating: development and validation of a questionnaire for the French-Canadian population

Objective: The present study aimed to develop and validate a questionnaire assessing social support for healthy eating in a French-Canadian population. Design: A twenty-one-item questionnaire was developed. For each item, participants were asked to rate the frequency, in the past month, with which the actions described had been done by family and friends in two different environments: (i) at home and (ii) outside of home. The content was evaluated by an expert panel. A validation study sample was recruited and completed the questionnaire twice. Exploratory factor analysis was performed on items to assess the number of subscales. Internal consistency reliability was assessed using Cronbach's a. Test-retest reliability was evaluated with intraclass correlations between scores of the two completions. Setting: Online survey. Subjects: Men and women from the Quebec City area (n 150). Results: The content validity assessment led to a few changes, resulting in a twenty-two-item questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a two-factor structure for both environments, resulting in four subscales: supportive actions at home; non-supportive actions at home; supportive actions outside of home; and non-supportive actions outside of home. Two items were removed from the questionnaire due to low loadings. The four subscales were found to be reliable (Cronbach's a = 0.82-0.94; test-retest intraclass correlation = 0.51-0.70). Conclusions: The Social Support for Healthy Eating Questionnaire was developed for a French-Canadian population and demonstrated good psychometric properties. This questionnaire will be useful to explore the role of social support and its interactions with other factors in predicting eating behaviours.