Development of A New Scale to Measure Culinary Acculturation of Immigrants Who Are Living in Turkey: Validity and Reliability Assessment

Abstract

The effect of immigration on diet and health should be captured with dietary intake, but also through assessing culturally based culinary exposures. Therefore, a visual instrument, Culinary Acculturation Assessment Inventory (CAAI) was developed to assess culinary acculturation and determined its validity and reliability for first generation immigrants. Turkey was used as a case study to evaluate culinary acculturation of immigrants to Turkish Cuisine. Standard scale development methods were employed with 256 participants (55% women) of 64% immigrants from 53 countries and 36% people from Turkey. The final version of CAAI included 19 items across one dietary pattern and three culinary patterns as a result of principal component analyses. Dietary and culinary pattern z-scores were compared between immigrants and the referent population from Turkey. Factor loads of dietary pattern ranged between 0.388 and 0.686 with an alpha of 0.729, while the factor loads of culinary patterns ranged between 0.480 and 0.860 with an alpha of 0.732. The CAAI scores of immigrants were positively correlated with language proficiency (r=0.295, p<0.001). When immigrant participants were divided into five regions as Slavic (n:32), Western (n:47), Asian (n:31), Sub-Saharan (n:22), and Mediterranean (n:30). Slavic immigrants had the highest level of culinary acculturation. Since this instrument could capture culinary acculturation of diverse group of immigrants who are living in the same host country, it has the potential to progress dietary acculturation research towards culinary acculturation.