Poor hygiene
Read the 5 poor hygiene items: raw mean, concrete examples, missing responses and interpretation limits.
Add the 5 numeric 1–6 ratings and divide by 5, rounding to one decimal. Any unscored response withholds this part’s mean. The eight means are separate; no total, norm or cutoff is calculated.
The five hygiene situations
- This part contains five published situations concerning dirty restaurant cutlery, a cook with greasy hair and dirty fingernails, a cook with an open cut, nose-blowing before serving and another person’s hair in soup. The statements are prompts for imagined disgust ratings. They do not inspect a real kitchen or establish the safety of a meal.
- The source uses concrete wording that can evoke different associations. Rate your own reaction to the scene rather than making a judgment about a real person from their appearance. The questionnaire cannot evaluate a food handler’s competence, a person’s character or the circumstances behind an observation.
Five ratings and an unequal-length part
- This is the only five-item part. With ratings of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, the sum is 20 and the mean is 20 ÷ 5 = 4.0. The denominator is five, not the four used by most other parts. The result displays the sum and coverage explicitly to keep that distinction visible.
- All five must have a 1–6 numeric response to calculate the mean. Four numeric ratings and one unscored choice do not produce a partial mean in this website edition. This complete-part rule is a conservative missing-data policy, not a newly validated FDS cutoff or a claim of greater accuracy.
What a raw hygiene mean describes
- A greater mean reports greater disgust across these five imagined scenes. It does not mean that a person is more hygienic, more responsible or safer to share food with. The questions ask for feelings toward situations, not an observation of actual cleaning or food-handling behavior.
- A lesser mean does not imply poor standards, indifference to other people or unsafe behavior. It is possible to take a practical concern seriously while experiencing little disgust. Read differences as descriptive responses within this bank, without a good-versus-bad hygiene classification.
Not every item has to feel the same
- A person may respond strongly to a hair in soup but less strongly to the wording about an open cut. Another may give the opposite pattern. Averaging five ratings compresses those differences. Reviewing the individual choices can be more informative than trying to interpret one rounded mean as a complete story.
- Familiarity with a situation, the detail you imagined and whether you have encountered it recently can matter. The test does not ask you to supply private examples. You can use the unscored option if the prompt does not support a rating you want to give.
Hygiene and contact are different source parts
- The human-contact part concerns shared utensils, bitten bread, touched food and food from a barely known neighbor. Those scenes are not the same as the five hygiene prompts. A person may respond differently to a familiar friend’s contact and to a dirty utensil; the two means remain separate.
- The source part names are organizational labels for the questionnaire, not judgments that every named scene is equally concerning. They do not replace practical information about a real situation. None of the eight means is used to create a food-safety profile or a dominant personality.
Disgust does not certify safety
- Someone may notice a practical problem calmly and respond appropriately without a strong feeling of disgust. Someone else may feel intense disgust at a harmless association. These examples show why the mean cannot certify safety, hygiene knowledge or whether a feeling is justified in a particular case.
- The scale does not diagnose obsessive-compulsive disorder, contamination anxiety or any other condition. No clinical or population threshold is applied. A concern in everyday life should be understood from its actual context and effects, without confirming or dismissing it through this number.
Review a statement without an exposure task
- You may privately compare two statements and notice whether the response concerns a visible object, a preparation detail or a social context. There is no need to recreate a scene, inspect someone’s body or ask another person to demonstrate anything. Simply reading the explanation is sufficient.
- If discussing the result, focus on your stated reaction rather than labeling people as clean or dirty. Sharing is optional and includes only a public test link. A personal mean is neither a request for others to change nor evidence about anyone else’s behavior.
Source, edition and attribution
- The 32 English prompts come from Supplementary Table 2 of García-Gómez L, Romero-Rebollar C, Hartmann C, Siegrist M, Ferreira G, Gutierrez-Aguilar R, Villalpando S and Pacheco-Lopez G (2020), Food Disgust Scale: Spanish Version, Frontiers in Psychology 11:165, DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00165, reused under CC BY 4.0. The document was supplied through NLM’s PMC open-access collection. This page selects the complete English bank and the article’s 1–6 endpoints; the Spanish table’s printed 1–5 format is not used.
- Changes comprise a fresh Chinese working translation from English, optional unscored responses, complete-part missingness handling, one-decimal display and original explanatory readings. This is not the validated Spanish administration or a validated Chinese version, and source research does not validate this website. No original-author endorsement, norm, diagnosis or food-safety judgment is implied.