Background: Unhealthy dietary habits, driven by a shift from home-cooked meals to dining out, are contributing significantly to Malaysia’s rising burden of non-communicable diseases. Food handlers play a critical role in shaping the dietary quality outside home through their cooking behavior. However, validated instruments to assess healthy cooking behavior among food handlers are scarce. This study aimed to validate the Healthy Cooking Index in Malay (HCI-M) to assess healthy cooking behavior among Malaysian food handlers.
Methods: The tool underwent a rigorous adaptation process involving local contextualization of cooking practices, content validation, forward-backward translation by experts, face validity, test-retest, and principal component analysis (PCA) among the study population. Eligible participants were adult food handlers involved in cooking, proficient in Malay, recruited through purposive sampling from food premises at Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur and Kota Marudu, Sabah. Fast food and bakery establishments were excluded. Participants completed a self-administered questionnaire. Data were analyzed through Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and FACTOR statistical software.
Results: The HCI-M demonstrated good item-level content validity index (I-CVI) and excellent scale-level content validity index (S-CVI) (I-CVI =0.86 and S-CVI =0.96, respectively). The items were well-understood by the target group and revised further after debriefing. Test-retest reliability showed acceptable to excellent agreement across items (kappa >0.40). PCA confirmed three meaningful components (eigenvalue >1) with all items loading above 0.4, and total variance explained was 53%.
Conclusions: The HCI-M is a valid and reliable tool to assess healthy cooking behavior among Malaysian food handlers. It will guide in designing effective interventions to improve and monitor healthy cooking behavior among food handlers, which can potentially reduce diet-related disease risk at the population level.
