Development and psychometrics of self-care assessment scale in heart surgery patients based on health promotion model

In cardiovascular studies, self-care is defined as the extent of one’s adherence to treatment recommendations, response to disease symptoms and adoption of healthy lifestyles. The current study seeks to design an appropriate tool to measure self-care behaviors of those patients with heart surgery experience.
This was a descriptive- analytical study conducted over 420 patients who had undergone heart surgery in cardiovascular center of Mazandaran Hospital in 2015. Having studied the related literature, an initial questionnaire was developed and edited. To measure validity, reliability and fitness of the model with the data obtained, content validity, internal consistency, test-retest analysis and confirmatory factor analysis through AMOS-22 were respectively used.
To qualitatively measure the content validity, suggestions offered in the questionnaire by the experts were applied. To quantitatively measure the content validity of the study, 15 items were omitted from the initial 112 ones. The CVI and CVR of the remaining 97 items of the questionnaire were 0.90 and 0.84 respectively. Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the questionnaire was .77 and its average correlation was 0.88. The confirmatory factor analysis proved all indices to be appropriate.
The developed questionnaire possesses appropriate psychometric features for measuring self-care behaviors of the patients with heart surgery experience. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire were proved as ideal and the overall structure of the questions was confirmed.