Keywords

Health behavior in children, Parent and child, Parenting, Self efficacy

Abstract

The issue of childhood obesity has become a pandemic of increasing prevalence and concern. Many behaviors contributing to overweight and obesity, such as dietary intake and physical activity, are learned in childhood. It is known that parents are key agents for change in their children. Therefore, interventions aimed at decreasing childhood overweight and obesity should be targeted at parents. Many parents state that they know the healthy dietary and physical activity behaviors they should adopt for their children, but lack the confidence, or self-efficacy, to enact these behaviors. A review of the literature for self-efficacy for behaviors in these domains in parents, adults and children uncovered many key elements involved. A search for an instrument to measure parental self-efficacy was unsuccessful in locating such an instrument, so several instruments in related domains were analyzed for content and utility for the generation of a new questionnaire. A 34-item questionnaire to measure parental self-efficacy for enacting healthy dietary and physical activity behaviors in their children 6-11 years old was developed and tested with a sample of 146 parents of children 6-11 years old, who could read and write English and had access to a computer with the internet. Internal reliability of the total scale was 0.94 and the two factors, dietary behaviors (DB) and physical activity behaviors (PAB) were 0.93 and 0.94, respectively. Test-retest reliability was also significant (p

Notes

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Graduation Date

2010

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Dennis, Karen

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Nursing

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0002983

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0002983

Language

English

Release Date

May 2010

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Nursing, Nursing -- Dissertations, Academic

Included in

Nursing Commons

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