Translation and Standardization of World Health Organization Questionnaires about Five Principles of Food Safety to Assess Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Food Handlers

Abstract

Background and Aim: Food handlers have an important role in food contamination. This study determined validity and reliability of the world health organization questionnaires about five essential principles of food safety in food handlers for assessment of their knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP). Materials and Methods: For standardization, these steps were performed: 1) Getting permission of the world health organization 2) Translating the questionnaire twice in Persian and again in English 3) using expert ideas and determination of inter rated agreement (IRA), relevancy and clarity of each question and the tool as a whole 4) measuring Reliability with Cronbach’s alpha, and repeatability was measured with intra-cluster correlation through repeated test-piloting after 1 month. Results: Using a conservative approach, the IRA for the overall relevancy and clarity of the tools were 81%, 90% and 90%, and 95%, 95%, 97.5% respectively. The overall Cronbach’s alpha for KAP were 70%, 73%, 99% respectively and the intra-cluster correlation (ICC) that was obtained through comparing the overall score of the questionnaire in the pre-test and test phase were 0.69%, 0.75%, 0.99% respectively. Conclusion: These new tools have good reliability and validity and they have very important, simple and clear principles of food safety so researchers, managers and food handlers can use them.

Keywords

• standardization
• food safety questionnaire
• knowledge
• attitude
• semi industrial kitchen