A Questionnaire Survey to Assess Motivations for Food Intake in Sundanese Communities in Indonesia, and an Assessment of the Applicability of the Questionnaire

Abstract

Exploring the motivations for people’s food choices and intake could assist with planning health intervention programs and with better understanding behavioral differences among individuals, communities, and cultures. However, few studies on this topic have been done in rural areas in developing countries. Moreover, questionnaires to assess factors influencing food choice and food intake have been developed and tested almost exclusively in Western populations. We conducted a survey in Sundanese rural communities in Indonesia with The Eating Motivation Survey (TEMS) questionnaire to evaluate motivations for food intake and assessed its applicability in terms of its scale reliability and content validity for the population. We collected responses to the TEMS from 155 residents of two rural communities. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was calculated to assess scale reliability and internal consistency, and an exploratory factor analysis was performed to assess content validity. We observed higher subscale scores for habits and price, suggesting they are strong motivations characteristic of this population. Nevertheless, the scale reliability of the TEMS in the study area was generally poor; alpha coefficients were less than 0.7, below the threshold for modest reliability, for 10 of 15 motivation subscales. The exploratory factor analysis results showed different categorization of the items from the original TEMS. The results suggested that the 15-factor structure of the TEMS is not suitable for the study population, indicating that the motivation subscale categorization varies by population.