Development of an instrument in Portuguese to identify barriers for physical activity in children

Abstract

The aim of this study was to develop an instrument to identify barriers to PA in children. This is a validation study with observational and cross-sectional design. The population consisted of students aged 06-09 years from the city of Uruguaiana/RS. The instrument content was obtained by theoretical matrix, constructed from the literature review and the assessment of barriers through open questions applied by proxy report (n=100) and focus groups conducted with parents/guardians and children. It is a questionnaire consisting of 29 closed questions. After testing the instrument clarity, its implementation was carried out (n = 293) to verify the construct validity and internal consistency. After one week, parents/guardians were asked to answer the questionnaire retest reliability (n = 168) to verify the agreement. Exploratory factor analysis distributed the 29 questions in six factors, with total variance of 55.6%. All items that have defined the factors obtained load greater than 0.4 and eingenvalues above 1.0. In the internal consistency analysis, item-total correlations ranged from 0.23 to 0.64 and the total alpha value was 0.90. Reproducibility values ranged from 0.43 to 0.78. Twenty-four questions met all the criteria adopted for the study. It was concluded that the instrument developed has adequate validity and reliability for the identification of barriers to PA in schoolchildren aged 06-09 years.