A meta-synthesis of health-related self-efficacy instrumentation: problems and suggestions.
OBJECTIVE
Self-efficacy, a central construct in health interventions, has been measured in various contexts. The absence of any published meta-review of self-efficacy instrumentation led to the current meta-synthesis that reports and evaluates the instrumentation processes.


METHODS
A systematic search resulted in 39 self-efficacy instrumentation studies, which were evaluated for the aspects of conceptual bases, health contexts, operational definition, instrumentation procedures, reliability and scale length, and item content.


RESULTS
Primarily based in Bandura's social cognitive theory, these studies reported self-efficacy instrumentation for developing new scales and modifying/validating measures for illness management, healthy behavior adoption/maintenance, disease/risk prevention, and aging management. Trait-like, specific-domain, and situation approaches were used for generating item content. Problems in some studies include non-efficacy items, a lack of systematic instrumentation procedures, item content too general for specific-domain self-efficacy, and measurement inefficiency.


CONCLUSIONS
The piecemeal fashion of self-efficacy instrumentation has resulted in incomparable self-efficacy measures of similar domains of health functioning. A trans-domain framework, thus, is warranted. Suggestions are provided for solving other problems in self-efficacy instrumentation.
Vivian C
VC
Sheer
D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D020377:Self Efficacy; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires