Internal consistency and content validity of a questionnaire aimed to assess the stages of behavioral lifestyle changes in Colombian schoolchildren: The Fuprecol study

ABSTRACT Objective To assess internal consistency and content validity of a questionnaire aimed to assess the stages of Behavioural Lifestyle Changes in a sample of school-aged children and adolescents aged 9 to 17 years-old. Methods This validation study involved 675 schoolchildren from three official school in the city of Bogota, Colombia. A self-administered questionnaire called Behavioural Lifestyle Changes has been designed to explore stages of change regarding to physical activity/exercise, fruit and vegetable consumption, alcohol abuse, tobacco use, and drug abuse. Cronbach-α, Kappa index and exploratory factor analysis were used for evaluating the internal consistency and validity of content, respectively. Results The study population consisted of 51.1% males and the participants’ average age was 12.7±2.4 years-old. Behavioural Lifestyle Changes scored 0.720 (range 0.691 to 0.730) on the Cronbach α and intra-observer reproducibility was good (Kappa=0.71). Exploratory factor analysis determined two factors (factor 1: physical activity/exercise, fruit and vegetable consumption, and factor 2: alcohol abuse tobacco use and drug abuse), explaining 67.78% of variance by the items and six interactions χ2/gL=11649.833; p