Development of a Scale for Assessing Fussy Eating Behaviour in Children

This study aimed to investigate fussy eating behaviour in 3-9-year-old children by developing a new scale to assess its true nature in our culture. By exploring phenomenology among indigenous individuals, a scale for fussy eating behaviour was created. For this purpose, a group of people who have or are experiencing this problem (fussy eating) were asked to express their thoughts and feelings, and respond to it. Afterwards, expert’s validation process involved five experts. The next stage involved creating a league table and finalizing scale’s items by removing the outliers from the item list. So the final list of fussy eating behaviour scale has 37 items in total. By running factor analysis, a total of two factors “Behavioural Responders” and “General Attitude” were extracted from the fussy eating behaviour scale. The psychometric properties were revealed to be acceptable with Cronbach alpha 0.93 and test retest r= .79 and valid a scale with acceptable psychometric properties. The study found that fussy eating behaviour is more common in girls and in early childhood. It is also more likely to be displayed in children with more siblings. However, there were no differences between clinical and non-clinical populations. To increase reliability, fathers should also be included in interviews, as mothers may sometimes overstate their children's eating issues. More research is needed to confirm the norms of the scale and make it more practically useful.