Table 1.
Descriptive and scale information of parental feeding styles and parenting style dimensions
| Category | Concept | Measurement year | n | No. of items | Example item | Answering scale† | Cronbach's α‡ | Mean score | sd | Range of scores |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Parental feeding style | Instrumental Feeding | 2009 | 1547 | 4 | ‘I reward my child with something to eat when s/he is well behaved’ | A | 0·71 | 1·6 | 0·6 | 1·0–4·3 |
| Emotional Feeding | 2009 | 1547 | 5 | ‘I give my child something to eat to make him/her feel better when s/he has been hurt’ | A | 0·85 | 1·4 | 0·5 | 1·0–3·8 | |
| Encouragement | 2009 | 1547 | 8 | ‘I encourage my child to try foods that s/he has not tasted before’ | A | 0·79 | 3·7 | 0·6 | 1·3–5·0 | |
| Overt Control | 2009 | 1547 | 10 | ‘I decide how many snacks my child should have’ | A | 0·75 | 4·4 | 0·4 | 2·2–5·0 | |
| Covert Control | 2009 | 1547 | 3 | ‘I avoid buying unhealthy food in the supermarket’ | A | 0·67 | 3·0 | 0·7 | 1·0–5·0 | |
| Sum score | sd | |||||||||
| Parenting style dimensions | Support | 2008 | 1839 | 7 | ‘When my child gets a low grade in school, I offer to help him/her’ | B | 0·71 | 11·02 | 2·4 | 1·7–14·0 |
| Behavioural Control | 2008 | 1839 | 7 | ‘I try to know where my child goes after school’ | B | 0·72 | 9·5 | 4·2 | −5·0–14·0 | |
| Psychological Control | 2008 | 1839 | 8 | ‘I make my child feel guilty when he/she gets a low grade in school’ | B | 0·72 | −6·7 | 4·1 | −16·0–16·0 |
†Answering scale A: never (1) to always (5); answering scale B: completely disagree (−2) to completely agree (+2).
‡The reliability of the parental feeding style scales was assessed by calculating Cronbach's α values (internal consistency) and (average) corrected item–total correlations, which indicate the degree to which an individual item relates to the total scale score. Corrected item–total correlations ≥0·30 are regarded as good and ≤0·15 as unreliable( 63 ). Average corrected item–total correlations were good and ranged from 0·41 to 0·67. One corrected item–total correlation was <0·30 (0·21 for an Overt Control item).