Mother's lifestyle: development of a questionnaire to assess a determinant of children's health. A cross-sectional study

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE: Lifestyle includes the personal attitudes or behavioral patterns that result in risks or benefits to the individual's own health or that of others. Children's health is particularly determined by their mother's lifestyle. The objective here was to develop and evaluate the reliability of a questionnaire capable of describing the lifestyles of preschoolers' mothers in terms of their activities, interests, opinions and values. DESIGN AND SETTING: Cross-sectional study conducted in a public university. METHODS: This study was conducted between January 2010 and March 2011, among 255 mothers of preschoolers living in the southeastern region of the municipality of São Paulo. A proportional stratified random probabilistic sample with two strata was selected: schools were drawn and then the children. Three instruments found in the literature were used to create the lifestyle questionnaire. The questionnaire was developed in eight stages: preliminary pretest, cultural adaptation, second pretest, pilot study, semantic correction and adaptation, third pretest, final research and final retest. Cronbach's alpha and pairwise correlation coefficients were used. RESULTS: The Cronbach's alpha value in the final version was 0.83 and the pre and post-test pairwise correlation coefficients were greater than 0.5. Factor analysis identified five factors that explained 73.51% of the correlation variance. As a result, seven variables were eliminated from the questionnaire. CONCLUSIONS: The questionnaire described five lifestyle domains, with good reliability, and can be used in combination with preschoolers' health and nutritional outcomes