Development of a health habits scale.
The present study is based on the assumption that health habits assessment can make a significant contribution to our understanding of physical and psychological well-being. Thus, the purpose of this study was to develop an easily administered, conceptually sound, and psychometrically adequate health habits scale for use in nursing and health research. A self-report scale consisting of 5 positive health items and 5 negative items was administered initially to a sample of more than 1500 American adults. Subsamples of this group were used in various psychometric evaluations of the scale. A second sample of more than 700 college and noncollege adults also completed the new health habits scale and a number of additional inventories thought to be related conceptually to the new scale. In general, the health scale showed high content validity, good agreement between self- and other-ratings, strong test-retest reliability, and consistent evidence of concurrent and divergent validity. The strengths of the scale are its inclusion of both disease-preventive and health-promoting behaviors, its brevity, and its psychometric development.
Williams
R L
RL
Educational and Counseling Psychology Department, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 37996-3400.
Thomas
S P
SP
Young
D O
DO
Jozwiak
J J
JJ
Hector
M A
MA
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D006184:Habits; D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D009730:Nursing Assessment / Q000379:methods*; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*