2.6. The Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ)

The FCQ was developed in 1995 by Steptoe, Pollard, and Wardle [22], who recognized the initial gap in the literature on food and eating behavior. Until then, no tool had been developed to rigorously measure individuals’ motives surrounding food choice. They identified motives driving food choice through confirmatory factor analysis. Findings indicated that cost, convenience, familiarity, natural content (e.g., contains no additives, artificial ingredients), health, mood, sensory appeal, ethical concerns, and weight control were important motivating factors [22]. They found that these factors differ across individuals in terms of how they affect food choice [22]. These motivations may shift over time or vary by food encounter; nevertheless, primary motives can be identified with the FCQ, and these motives can provide useful information for health professionals and researchers.

Despite its strengths, the FCQ has limitations, including the lack of cross-cultural validation studies and the potential for social desirability and social approval to bias responses [35,36,37,38,39]. Though validated, scholars have questioned the comprehensiveness of the FCQ [31]. In other words, the FCQ has been criticized for failing to effectively capture all the possible motives for food choice. In a meta-analysis on the use of the FCQ internationally, Cuhna et al. found that the most common changes to the questionnaire made by researchers were additions [40]. On the other hand, researchers also have criticized the tool’s level of abstraction [40]. They suggested that many of the categorizations could be sensibly grouped (e.g., weight control and health) to create a more robust motivational scale that could be validated across more diverse samples [40]. Despite these limitations, the FCQ maintains a strong reputation for reliability because of the many studies that have employed it for various ends [41,42,43,44].