Development of the Home Cooking EnviRonment and Equipment Inventory Observation form (Home-CookERI TM ): An Assessment of Content Validity, Face Validity, and Inter-Rater Agreement

• Published in: Nutrients Vol. 12; no. 6; p. 1853
• Main Authors: Schönberg, Sonja, Asher, Roberta, Stewart, Samantha, Fenwick, Matthew J, Ashton, Lee, Bucher, Tamara, Van der Horst, Klazine, Oldmeadow, Christopher, Collins, Clare E, Shrewsbury, Vanessa A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 21.06.2020; MDPI
• Subjects: Alcoholic beverages; Australia; Behavior; Beverages; Cooking; cooking environment; Diet; Environment; Epidemiology; Family Characteristics; Food; Food technology; Health promotion; Households; Humans; inter-rater agreement; Low income groups; Nutrition; Nutrition research; Observer Variation; online survey; Polls & surveys; Quality; Questionnaires; Questions; Reproducibility; Reproducibility of Results; Surveys and Questionnaires; Validity; Australia; France; United States > US; cooking environment; validity; reproducibility; inter-rater agreement; online survey
• ISSN: 2072-6643; 2072-6643
• DOI: 10.3390/nu12061853

Quantifying Home Cooking EnviRonments has applications in nutrition epidemiology, health promotion, and nutrition interventions. This study aimed to develop a tool to quantify household cooking environments and establish its content validity, face validity, and inter-rater agreement. The Home Cooking EnviRonment and equipment Inventory observation form (Home-CookERI™) was developed as a 24-question (91-item) online survey. Items included domestic spaces and resources for storage, disposal, preparation, and cooking of food or non-alcoholic beverages. Home-CookERI was piloted to assess content validity, face validity, and usability with six Australian experts (i.e., dietitians, nutrition researchers, chefs, a food technology teacher, and a kitchen designer) and 13 laypersons. Pilot participants provided feedback in a 10 min telephone interview. Home-CookERI™ was modified to an 89-item survey in line with the pilot findings. Inter-rater agreement was examined between two trained raters in 33 unique Australian households. Raters were required to observe each item before recording a response. Home occupants were instructed to only assist with locating items if asked. Raters were blinded to each other's responses. Inter-rater agreement was calculated by Cohen's Kappa coefficient (κ) for each item. To optimize κ, similar items were grouped together reducing the number of items to 81. Home-CookERI had excellent content and face validity with responding participants; all 24 questions were both clear and relevant (X (1, = 19; 19.0, = 0.392)). Inter-rater agreement for the modified 81-item Home-CookERI™ was almost-perfect to perfect for 46% of kitchen items ( = 37 items, = 0.81-1), moderate to substantial for 28% ( = 23, = 0.51-0.8), slight to fair for 15% ( = 12, = 0.01-0.5), and chance or worse for 11% of items ( = 9, ≤ 0.0). Home-CookERI was further optimized by reduction to a 77-item version, which is now available to researchers. Home-CookERI™ is a comprehensive tool for quantifying Australian household cooking environments. It has excellent face and content validity and moderate to perfect inter-rater agreement for almost three-quarters of included kitchen items. To expand Home-CookERI™ applications, a home occupant self-completion version is planned for validation.