Influences on Catered Event Ordering in a University Workplace: Development and Validation of the Understanding Food Ordering Survey

Purpose:To develop and validate an instrument to identify factors that influence what is ordered for catered events for employees at a large university.Design:Themes derived from focus groups were used to develop a survey.Setting:A large public university in central Texas.Subjects:Twenty-seven administrative assistants who order food participated in focus groups, 138 completed the survey, and 31 completed the survey a second time.Measures:One hundred fourteen-question, 5-point Likert scale survey.Analysis:Principal component analyses explored constructs. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed structure validity. Test -retest analyses assessed reliability.Results:The final survey, the Understanding Food Ordering Survey (UFO), included 19 items within 3 factors; all factor loadings were above 0.3, with no cross-loadings. Three factors explained 55.5% of the variance. Cronbach α values of .846 for social influences from supervisors/coworkers, .838 for restrictions on ordering due to policies/vendors/attendee...