Development of a Tool to Assess Past Food Insecurity of Immigrant Latino Mothers

• Published in: Journal of nutrition education and behavior Vol. 38; no. 6; pp. 378 - 382
• Main Authors: Kuyper, Edith M., Espinosa-Hall, Gloria, Lamp, Catherine L., Martin, Anna C., Metz, Diane L., Smith, Dorothy, Townsend, Marilyn S., Kaiser, Lucia L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01-11-2006; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: Adult; Babies; California; Child, Preschool; Comparative Analysis; Cross-Sectional Studies; Diet Surveys; Emigration and Immigration - statistics & numerical data; Female; Focus Groups; food insecurity; food security; Food Supply - statistics & numerical data; Grounded Theory; Hispanic Americans; Hispanic people; Humans; Hunger; immigrants; Interviews; Interviews as Topic; Latin America - ethnology; Latino; Latinos; life course perspective; Low Income; Low income groups; Male; Mothers; Noncitizens; Nutrition; Poverty; Statistical Analysis; Validation studies; Validity; California; Latin America; United States > US; food insecurity; Latino; life course perspective
• ISSN: 1499-4046; 1878-2620; 1708-8259
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jneb.2006.05.019

The purpose is to describe the development and validation of a tool to measure the degree of past food insecurity in an immigrant US population.
Focus group discussions and a structured interview. As a first step, focus group discussions were conducted among immigrant Latino mothers. Based on these discussions, an 8-item tool was developed and pilot-tested in a convenience sample of mothers.
California.
Twenty-two low-income Latino mothers with children, ages 4 to 5 years, in the focus groups and 85 low-income Latino and white mothers of young children in the structured interviews.
Constant comparative analysis, Cronbach α, Spearman correlations, Chi-square, and Kruskal-Wallis test.
Internal consistency of the remaining 7 items was good (Cronbach α = 0.84). Evidence of convergent validity included significant correlations between past food insecurity and maternal education (r = -0.45, p<.0001), crowding in the mother’s childhood household (r = +0.30, p<.006), and past food insufficiency (r = +0.74, p<.0001). Foreign-born Latino mothers reported significantly greater levels of past food insecurity than US-born mothers, demonstrating discriminant validity (p<.01).
This tool may be useful to determine how past deprivation influences current food choices and other nutrition-related behaviors in low-income Latino immigrants.