Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-20-2025

Publication Title

Frontiers in Public Health

Volume

13

First page number:

1

Last page number:

16

Abstract

Objectives: Community-dwelling older adults face unique challenges related to nutrition and health, but little is known about their barriers and facilitators for healthy eating behaviors. This study sought to develop and evaluate a new instrument to measure the capability, opportunity, and motivation for healthy eating behaviors (COM-HE) among community-dwelling older adults.

Design: A mixed methods approach was used to obtain qualitative and quantitative data. Participants were aged 65 years or older, community-dwelling, and English-speaking. Participants engaged in focus groups (n = 12) and pilot-testing (n = 81) to evaluate the COM-HE instrument. The Rapid Eating Assessment for Participants – Shortened Version (REAP-S) questionnaire was utilized to examine correlations between the COM-HE instrument and self-reported dietary quality. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to investigate acceptability, reliability, and validity.

Results: The COM-HE instrument achieved acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.847–0.986), displayed varying levels of uni-dimensionality based on multiple principal component analyses (total variance explained by three components = 86.72%), and was correlated with self-reported dietary quality scores (r = 0.409, adjusted R2 = 0.099, p = 0.031). Preliminary data suggest that the scale was acceptable in terms of readability and understanding among a convenience sample of generally well-educated older adults.

Conclusion: The new COM-HE instrument was acceptable, reliable, and valid among a homogeneous sample of adults over 65 years of age. These results suggest a need for additional development, evaluation, and refinement of the instrument in more diverse groups of older adults.

Keywords

behavioral assessment; instrument development; nutrition barriers; psychometric evaluation; healthy aging; eating motivation

Disciplines

Human and Clinical Nutrition | Medical Nutrition

File Format

pdf

File Size

1683 KB

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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