# Psychometrics of the modified Family-Centered Care Assessment short version for childhood obesity

## TL;DR

This study developed a shorter version of a tool to measure family-centered care in childhood obesity interventions, ensuring it is reliable and valid.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is the creation of a shortened, psychometrically sound version of the mFCCA for efficient assessment of family-centered care.

## Key findings

- The shortened mFCCA reduced items from 24 to 8 while maintaining a single factor structure.
- Rasch modeling confirmed acceptable internal consistency (0.7) and strong validity of the scale.
- The short version reduces participant burden and can improve outcomes in childhood obesity interventions.

## Abstract

Incorporating principles of family-centered care into pediatric weight management interventions can improve the effectiveness and quality of treatment and reduce attrition rates. To assess the family-centeredness of interventions, reliable, valid, and easy-to-administer scales are needed. The purpose of the study was to develop a shortened version of the modifed Family Centered Care Assessment (mFCCA) and assess its psychometric properties.

The mFCCA, a scale to assess the family-centeredness of interventions for childhood obesity, was administered to families following the Connect for Health randomized control trial evaluating the effectiveness of a primary care-based pediatric weight management intervention. We iteratively removed items from the mFCCA and used Rasch modeling to examine the reliability and validity of the shortened scale.

We included data from 318 parents and the exploratory factor analysis showed the presence of a single factor. The results of the Rasch modeling demonstrated acceptable internal consistency of the scale (0.7) and strong validity as evidenced by the overall model fit and range of item difficulty. Following the psychometric analyses, we reduced the number of items from 24 to 8 items.

The mFCCA short version demonstrates good psychometrics and can be used to evaluate the family-centeredness of childhood obesity interventions with reduced participant burden, thereby improving outcomes for children with obesity.

Clinicaltrials.gov
NCT02124460 registered on April 24, 2014