Application of the Food Choice Questionnaire across cultures: Systematic review of cross-cultural and single country studies

The Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ) is a 36-item instrument assessing the importance of a number of factors that influence food choice: “health”, “sensory appeal”, “price”, “convenience”, “mood”, “natural content”, “weight control”, “familiarity” and “ethical concern”. The FCQ already counts with applications from over 40 countries and its translation into more than 20 languages. The main objective of this paper is to review the application of the FCQ across cultures considering both cross-cultural and single country studies. A systematic review has been performed enclosing all the studies that apply the FCQ (in full, partially or following an adaptation) referred in the Web of Science and/or Scopus. After the scrutiny of more than 1,000 articles, 71 original articles were retrieved for this analysis. For each article, the following methodological aspects were considered: type of application, response scales, translation, scope, sampling procedures and data analysis strategies. For a smaller set of articles, reporting five cross-cultural studies (fully applying the FCQ), an additional analysis was performed to evaluate response styles, compare scale usage between countries and identify the most and least relevant food choice criteria. Several studies have shown the invariance of the FCQ across cultures, while others present the need for adaptations of the FCQ. Critical appraisal suggests that the original set of items should be adapted to accommodate the different cultures under study and that response scales should have a large number of points. The major conclusion is the strong lack of uniformity of procedures across the different studies hindering an adequate comparison of results between cultures.