Nutrition practice in type 2 diabetes: construction, validity and reliability of a scale

Abstract

Background: diabetes is a complex disease that requires multiple strategies for glycemic control. The most challenging part is acquiring healthy eating practices. What is needed is to keep patients well informed and involved with their disease; for this, standardized, reliable instruments are required that allow evaluating the dietary practices in this population. Objective: to build and to validate a highly reliable evaluation scale of feeding habits in patients with diabetes type 2. Methodology: a cross-sectional design for the construction and validation of an evaluation scale for feeding habits in diabetes 2 patients. There were listed 63 questions subjected to review and statistics analysis that reduced it into a 30 ítems scale that was applied to 495 diabetes 2 patients in a first level attention clinic. There were used exploratory factorial analysis, sphericity Bartlett test, KMO, total variance explained, Spearman’s r-test and Cronbach’s alpha. Results: a final version was obtained containing 30 ítems distributed in 8 dimensions with 3 response options on the Likert scale, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.811. The exploratory factor analysis showed factor loads > 0.30. The total explained variance threw eight principal components; the KMO test = 0.833, Bartlett’s test of sphericity, p = 0.000. Conclusion: the scale to evaluate eating practices in patients with type 2 diabetes has the validity and high reliability to be able to apply it to this population.