[Validation of an instrument to measure food practices in Chilean families of school children aged 4-7 years].

It is necessary to assess family food habits in school children to cope with infant obesity.Designing and validation of an instrument to measure food habits and food knowledge in Chilean preschool and school families based on dietary guidelines.A pilot study in 30 preschool and school-age parents was carried-out. A questionnaire to measure food habits and food knowledge in parents was elaborated by researchers considering an expert group opinion. This questionnaire was applied twice with a 15 days interval, evaluating temporal stability, internal consistency and inter-personal agreement. Afterwards, the questionnaire was applied to 59 parents calculating the internal consistency of the instrument.The questionnaire had 55 questions in 4 sections. The instrument had questions about food and nutrition information about the families. A good inter-personal agreement resulted for almost all the questions about food and nutrition information (0.5-1.0). The correlation between the first and second test (test-retest) was high (0.6-1.0), as well as the internal consistency (0.75). In the section about frequency consumption in parents and children food consumption at home and school there was a high internal consistency for the two observers (0.85-0.92 and 0.87-0.90).The instrument is valid and useful to be utilized in preschool and school families intervened with nutrition education, and this methodology can be replied in other studies.