Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2018 Jan;32(1):224-232.
doi: 10.1177/0890117116679059. Epub 2016 Dec 6.

Short-Form Audit Instrument for Assessing Corner Store Healthfulness

Robin S DeWeese  1 , Michael Todd  2 , Allison Karpyn  3 , Michael J Yedidia  4 , Michelle Kennedy  4 , Meg Bruening  1 , Christopher M Wharton  1 , Punam Ohri-Vachaspati  1
Affiliations

Short-Form Audit Instrument for Assessing Corner Store Healthfulness

Robin S DeWeese et al. Am J Health Promot. 2018 Jan.

Abstract

Purpose: To develop a valid and feasible short-form corner store audit tool (SCAT) that could be used in-store or over the phone to capture the healthfulness of corner stores.

Design: Nonexperimental.

Setting: Four New Jersey cities.

Subjects: Random selection of 229 and 96 corner stores in rounds 1 and 2, respectively.

Measures: An adapted version of the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey for Corner Stores (NEMS-CS) was used to conduct in-store audits. The 7-item SCAT was developed and used for round 2 phone audits.

Analysis: Exploratory factor analysis and item response theory were used to develop the SCAT.

Results: The SCAT was highly correlated with the adapted NEMS-CS ( r = .79). Short-form corner store audit tool scores placed stores in the same healthfulness categories as did the adapted NEMS-CS in 88% of the cases. Phone response matches indicated that store owners did not distinguish between 2% and low-fat milk and tended to round up the fruit and vegetable count to 5 if they had fewer varieties.

Conclusion: The SCAT discriminates between higher versus lower healthfulness scores of corner stores and is feasible for use as a phone audit tool.

Keywords: built environment; corner stores; food environment; nutrition; nutrition audits.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure I.
Figure I.
Item characteristic curves (A) and item information curves (B) for 14 items and total information curves for 10 items (C) and 7 items (D).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Jilcott SB, Wade S, McGuirt JT, Wu Q, Lazorick S, Moore JB. The association between the food environment and weight status among eastern North Carolina youth. Public Health Nutr. 2011; 14(9):1610–1617. - PubMed
    1. Gustafson AA, Lewis S, Wilson C, Jilcott-Pitts S. Validation of food store environment secondary data source and the role of neighborhood deprivation in Appalachia, Kentucky. BMC Public Health. 2012;12:688. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Langellier BA.The food environment and student weight status, Los Angeles County, 2008–2009. Prev Chronic Dis. 2012;9:E61. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Powell LM, Slater S, Mirtcheva D, Bao Y, Chaloupka FJ. Food store availability and neighborhood characteristics in the United States. Prev Med. 2007;44(3):189–195. - PubMed
    1. Moore LV, Roux A. Associations of neighborhood characteristics with the location and type of food stores. Am J Public Health. 2006;96(2):325–331. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources