Home Cooking Quality Assessment Tool Validation Using Community Science and Crowdsourcing Approaches

Objective: To refine a measure of home cooking quality (defined as the usage level of practices with the potential to influence the nutrient content of prepared foods) and conduct a construct validation of the revised tool, the Healthy Cooking Questionnaire 2 (HCQ2).

Design: Two validation approaches are described: (1) a community science approach used to refine and validate Healthy Cooking Questionnaire (HCQ) constructs, and (2) responses to the revised HCQ (HCQ2) in a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers to determine questionnaire comprehension.

Setting: The Community Scientist Program at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center facilitated discussion groups to refine the HCQ questions and validate constructs. MTurk workers were subsequently recruited to complete the refined survey so that comprehension and associations with demographic variables could be explored.

Participants: Ten community scientists participated in the refinement of the HCQ. The revised tool (HCQ2) was completed by 267 adult US-based MTurk workers.

Variables measured: Demographics, HCQ concepts, HCQ2, Self-Reported Questionnaire Comprehension.

Analysis: Comprehension items were examined using descriptive statistics. Exploratory analysis the relationships between cooking quality and demographic characteristics, meal type, cooking frequency, as well as patterns of food preparation behavior was conducted on the MTurk sample RESULTS: The HCQ was refined through activities and consensus-building. MTurk responses to the HCQ2 indicated high comprehension and significant differences in cooking quality scores by demographic factors.

Conclusions and implications: This study refined and validated a self-report measure of cooking quality. Cooking quality measures offer critical evaluation methods for culinary programs.