CHILDREN’S EATING BEHAVIOR QUESTIONNAIRE: FACTORIAL VALIDATION AND DIFFERENCES IN SEX AND EDUCATIONAL LEVEL IN THAI SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN.

The purposes of this study were to test the validity of the Thai version Children’s Eating Behavior Questionnaire (CEBQ) and to describe the variation in eating style among school-age children. This school-based, cross sectional study was conducted in five primary public schools selected from Bangkok and the three regions of Thailand (North, Northeast, South). Six hundred and eighty students from the first and fourth grade classes were included in our study. The CEBQ was used to assess the eating styles among these children. Factor analysis revealed an eight-factor solution accounted for 57.1% of the total variance. Most of the scale items loaded as expected and their factor loadings were comparable to those obtained from the original study in England. The reliability coefficients are all within acceptable ranges (more than 0.7), with the exceptions of the subscales of ‘slowness in eating’ and ‘emotional under eating’ with the coefficients of 0.64 and 0.69, respectively. There were some significant differences in eating behaviors between sex and educational level. Boys scored higher on ‘enjoyment of food’ compared with girls (p<0.05), as well as on ‘desire to drink’ (p<0.05). Children in Grade 1 scored higher on ‘satiety responsiveness’ (p<0.001) and ‘slowness in eating’ (p<0.001) compared with those in Grade 4. This study supported the use of CEBQ as an appropriate tool for measuring the eating behaviors among Thai school-age children.