2.5. Caregiver Cooking Skills

Caregiver cooking skills were assessed using a modified cooking skills scale designed with consideration of basic Japanese cooking methods and typical meals [19]. The scale consisted of five items: (1) able to peel fruits and vegetables; (2) able to make stir-fried meat and vegetables; (3) able to make miso soup; (4) able to make stewed dishes; and (5) like to cook. Items 1 to 4 reflected basic cooking methods and were adopted from the Japanese cooking skills score [19]. Item 5 was newly added for the present study as an indicator of cooking skills, because a previous study on life-course trajectories of cooking skills found that liking to cook was a characteristic of people who maintained a high level of cooking skills [23]. Participants were asked to evaluate their own cooking skills on a six-point scale ranging from ‘do not agree at all’ (=0) to ‘agree very much’ (=5). A high score meant that the caregiver had high confidence in their cooking skills. In psychometric testing, one factor with eigenvalue >1 was found and accounted for 92.3% of the variance. The Cronbach’s α for the cooking skills scale in the study sample was 0.78. Factor loadings ranged from 0.3 (item 5) to 0.9 (item 2). We calculated the mean scores of the five items and divided the results into two categories: high (score > 4.0) and low (score ≤ 4.0) as described previously [19].