The Healthy Lifestyle Scale for University Students: development and psychometric testing
Wang Dong A B C , Xing Xiao-hui B and Wu Xian-bo A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Southern Medical University, 1023 Shatai Road, Guangzhou 510515, China.
B Department of Development and Planning, Southern Medical University, 1023 Shatai Road, Guangzhou 510515, China.
C Corresponding author. Email: dongw96@hotmail.com
Australian Journal of Primary Health 18(4) 339-345 https://doi.org/10.1071/PY11107
Submitted: 31 August 2011 Accepted: 12 December 2011 Published: 17 January 2012
Abstract
We report the development and validation of a scale to evaluate the healthy lifestyles of university students. The Delphi technique was used to determine the content validity of the scale with a panel of 33 experts. Psychometric testing was performed and confirmed with 6000 undergraduate students who were randomly selected from 10 universities in China. Three Delphi rounds were required to achieve final consensus for content validity. The split-half correlation coefficient and Cronbach’s α coefficient for the total scale were 0.841 and 0.892, respectively. Construct validity was supported by exploratory factor analysis, which yielded an eight-factor instrument that explained 55.02% of the variance in the 38 items. The proposed Healthy Lifestyle Scale for University Students has good construct validity and reliability and can be used as an evaluation tool for health counselling in university health centres.
Additional keywords: reliability, validity.
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