Generalizability Theory: a study in the area of infant nutrition
Fernanda da Motta Afonso, Haydée Serrão Lanzillotti, Maria Elisa Barros · DELOS Desarrollo Local Sostenible · 2025
The Dietary Guidelines for Brazilian Children under 2 Years Old is an official document of the Brazilian Ministry of Health and presents recommendations and information on feeding children in the beginning of life. The objective of this study was to estimate the reliability of the evaluation of Expert Judges and the People Responsible for Child Feeding on an instrument that aims to measure the knowledge about healthy eating of children under two years old. Convenience Sampling was chosen. The instrument (questionnaire) has 14 items on a five-point Likert scale. The methodological procedure was the Generalizability Theory (GT). GT provides a flexible, practical framework for examining the dependability of behavioural measurements. In the GT, One-way Factorial ANOVA was used. The investigative procedure partitioned the variance into item and evaluator, on a single occasion. The Generalizability Coefficient (GC) was calculated. The results showed that among the “Expert Judges”, the highest estimated proportion was for the score 5 (strongly agree), 51.79%. There was an equal choice for the scores 1 (strongly disagree) and 2 (disagree), 35.89%. The results obtained in relation to those responsible for feeding the child showed that the highest proportion was concentrated in the score 2 (disagree), 58.46%. The results allowed us to conclude that the Generalizability Coefficient (GC) reached 0.42 and 0.38 for the Expert Judges and People Responsible for Child Feeding, respectively. The higher reliability recorded for the Judges can be considered feasible, considering the difference between the cognitions of both groups.