title: Development of a health habits scale.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Educational and Counseling Psychology Department, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 37996-3400.
authors.forename: R L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Williams
authors.forename: S P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.forename: D O
authors.initials: DO
authors.lastname: Young
authors.forename: J J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Jozwiak
authors.forename: M A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Hector
mesh_terms: 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*