Background: Families face many barriers related to creating or maintaining a healthy lifestyle, which likely contributes to the prevalence of childhood obesity in the United States; however, no measure currently exists to examine these barriers. This study developed a quantitative measure of parents' perceptions of barriers to family healthy lifestyle.
Methods: Parents of children between the ages of 7-17 were recruited using Amazon Mturk (n = 812). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and preliminary convergent validity analyses were conducted.
Results: Four factors emerged in the final measure: Parent Disengagement, Cost and Built Environment, Lack of Family Support, and Family Time Constraints, with the final 19-item measure having good initial psychometric properties, including reliability and validity.
Conclusions: Future research is needed to examine whether this measure may be used in clinical practice to identify barriers to a healthy family lifestyle, to tailor interventions for families.
Keywords: barriers; childhood obesity; family; weight management.