Objectives
Addiction to fast food is a type of behavioral addiction that could be linked to public health problems, such as obesity. Therefore, it is essential to design a tool that serves as a detection of the possible traits that are part of the addictive behavior. The aim of the present study is to generate a Patient Report Outcome (PRO) for the screening of fast food addiction, to analyze its metric quality (reliability, information and validity).
Methods
The Fast Food Addiction Test (FFAT) was applied to a sample of 730 participants. In addition, the General Addiction (GAT) and Social Desirability Scales (MC-SDS) were used. The reliability, the Response Characteristic Curves (RCC) and the information functions of each item and the test were analyzed. In addition, the Pearson correlation was computed considering the frequency of fast food consumption and the scores of the GAT and MC-SDS scales as indicators of validity.
Results
The analysis allows to verify that the internal consistency (α =.771 and ω = .782) and discrimination indexes (average item-test correlation =.50) are satisfactory. The analysis of the evidence of validity shows that there is a significant correlation with the frequency of fast food consumption (r =.328, p <.001), the GAT test (r =-.624, p <.001) and with the scores on social desirability (r =.205, p <.001). The latter result might be related to the social acceptance of fast food consumption. In addition, the items are maximally informative for medium-to-high levels of the assessed trait (Max information range: 0<θ<4).
Conclusions
The information provided by the items and by the test would allow to shorten the application time without losing precision in the measurement by using computerized applications, thus allowing the use in consultations of Primary Care, Psychiatry and Endocrinology of a highly efficient instrument.
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