Measuring Food Agency

Cooking and Food Provisioning Scale (CAFPAS)

It is important to be able to assess food agency. The Cooking and Food Provisioning Scale (CAFPAS) is a tool for helping assess and measure the degree to which individuals are able to set and achieve cooking and provisioning goals. Unlike the Food Involvement Scale (FIS) which considers a much broader set of indicators (e.g., overall interest in food), the CAFPAS specifically focuses on food preparation skills and capacities. The validated scale offers a way to assess capacity, analyze interventions and also analyze individual and group differences. It can also be used to understand why some individuals struggle within an often complicated food environment while others thrive – in other words, it aims to measure food agency. The CAFPAS is a work in progress, and we are working to further validate, explore, and deploy it.

Publications

Lahne et al_2017_Development of the Cooking and Food Provisioning Action Scale (CAFPAS)

Lahne et al_2019_Corrigendum to “Development of the Cooking and Food Provisioning Action Scale