Good environmental practices check list for food services: elaboration, content validation and inter-rater reliability

Abstract With the objective of elaborating, validating the content of a good environmental practices checklist (LVBPA-SA) for food services, and verifying the inter-rater reliability, an instrument was constructed based on a literature survey and the guidelines established by Brazilian Legislation (National Solid Waste Policy, National Water Resources Policy, National Policy on Conservation and the Rational Use of Energy). The LVBPA-SA was evaluated by a specialist panel to validate the contents according to the Delphi technique. To verify the concordance level between the specialists, the content validity index was used, and the instrument was considered validated when the content validity index was ≥ 80%. The form of presentation, semantic clarity, and the ease of understanding, filling in and using the instrument were evaluated, and the specialists could suggest alterations to the instrument. After validation, the instrument was applied by seven nutritionists in the same food service to evaluate the good environmental practices and verify the inter-rater reliability using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) and Cronbach’s alpha at a significance level of 5%. The Kruskal-Wallis test was applied to compare the variance between responses. The validated LVBPA-SA contained five blocks and 68 evaluation items and 65% of the good environmental practices measurements were adopted by the food services. There was no statistically significant difference between the evaluations made by the nutritionists obtaining an ICC > 0.75 for 75% of the blocks. For the Cronbach's alpha, 100% of the blocks presented a coefficient ≥ 0.70, indicating excellent inter-rater agreement. Thus the contents of the LVBPA-SA were validated and showed internal consistency. In addition, it complied with the guidelines established by the Policies and lead to the adoption of good environmental practices, being an important instrument to be used in food services.