Psychometric properties and factor structure of the adapted Self-Regulation Questionnaire assessing autonomous and controlled motivation for healthful eating among youth with type 1 diabetes and their parents.
V Quick, L M Lipsky, T R Nansel
PMID 29770461WHAT IT FOUND
The adapted questionnaire did not capture lack of motivation well.
Parents who felt providing healthful food was personally valuable had better own diet quality and lower BMI. In older teens, motivation was linked to diet quality, but not younger children.
Key findings
01The amotivation items were unreliable and did not form a separate group, so they were removed.
02In the 8 to 12 year group, autonomous and controlled motivation moved together; in the 13 to 16 year group, they did not.
03Higher parent autonomous motivation was linked to better parent diet quality and lower parent BMI, while parent motivation was not linked to youth diet quality.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study was observational and cross-sectional, so it cannot show that motivation causes better diet or lower BMI. The amotivation subscale was removed, so the adapted questionnaire does not provide a usable measure of that construct. The sample came from a single pediatric diabetes center and included few minority and low-income families, so the results may not apply broadly. Diet was measured with self-report food records, which can be biased by social desirability. The questionnaire's stability over time and sensitivity to change were not tested.
Declared interests
The authors declared no financial conflicts of interest. The article is marked as supported by NIH extramural and intramural research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat this as evidence that improving motivation will improve eating or diabetes control. The study only linked questionnaire scores to diet and BMI at one time point, and it did not test an intervention.