Weight Control and Healthy Eating: Cross-cultural Invariance of Self-efficacy, Motivation, and Perceived Barriers

Background: Weight control and healthy eating can be assessed with instruments that measure constructs such as self-efficacy, motivation, and perceived barriers, contributing to a better understanding of the underlying psychosocial processes. This study examined the psychometric properties and cross-cultural invariance of three instruments: Healthy Eating and Weight Self-efficacy (HEWSE), Behavioral Regulation in Exercise Questionnaire (BREQ-3) adapted to weight control, and Barriers to Healthy Eating (BHE).Method: The sample included 1,045 Mexican and Spanish students (Mage = 16.67, SD = 1.37). Invariance, descriptive, and correlation analyses were conducted.Results: Structural, metric, scalar and strict invariance were supported for all three instruments. Significant cross-cultural differences emerged, with Mexican students showing stronger negative associations between HEWSE and both daily mechanism and social support perceived barriers, and between autonomous motivation and daily mechanism perceived barriers.Conclusions: The Mexican and Spanish versions of the instruments demonstrated adequate psychometric properties, supporting their use in cross-cultural research.