Validity and Reliability of the Facility List Coder, a New Tool to Evaluate Community Food Environments

Ana María Arcila-Agudelo, Juan Carlos Muñoz-Mora and Andreu Farran-Codina
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Ana María Arcila-Agudelo: Department of Nutrition, Food Science, and Gastronomy, XaRTA–INSA, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Barcelona, Av. Prat de la Riba, Campus de l’Alimentació de Torribera, 171, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, E-08921 Barcelona, Spain
Juan Carlos Muñoz-Mora: Department of Economics, Universidad EAFIT, Carrera 49, N 7 sur 50, Medellín 050024, Antioquia, Colombia
Andreu Farran-Codina: Department of Nutrition, Food Science, and Gastronomy, XaRTA–INSA, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Barcelona, Av. Prat de la Riba, Campus de l’Alimentació de Torribera, 171, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, E-08921 Barcelona, Spain

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 19, 1-12

Abstract: A community food environment plays an essential role in explaining the healthy lifestyle patterns of its community members. However, there is a lack of compelling quantitative approaches to evaluate these environments. This study introduces and validates a new tool named the facility list coder (FLC), whose purpose is to assess food environments based on data sources and classification algorithms. Using the case of Mataró (Spain), we randomly selected 301 grids areas (100 m 2 ), in which we conducted street audits in order to physically identify all the facilities by name, address, and type. Then, audit-identified facilities were matched with those automatically-identified and were classified using the FLC to determine its quality. Our results suggest that automatically-identified and audit-identified food environments have a high level of agreement. The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) estimates and their respective 95% confidence intervals for the overall sample yield the result “excellent” (ICC ≥ 0.9) for the level of reliability of the FLC.

Keywords: community food environment; nutrition environment; geographical information systems (GIS); Facility List Coder; Python (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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