Psychometric properties of a Symptom Management Self-Efficacy Scale for women living with HIV/AIDS.

Abstract

Many people with HIV/AIDS find it difficult to manage the symptoms of the disease, but by adopting effective symptom management behavior, they increase the potential of alleviating the burden of those symptoms. Self-efficacy is a recognized mediator of successful behavior change and is used by many researchers and clinicians when developing symptom management interventions. Despite this, an instrument measuring the self-efficacy of symptom management behavior specifically for people living with HIV/AIDS has not yet been made available. To introduce and test the psychometric properties of the HIV Symptom Management Self-Efficacy for Women Scale (HSM-SEWS) for women with HIV/AIDS. This scale, a new nine-item measurement instrument, was modified from the Chronic Disease Self-Efficacy Scale. In this study, psychometric testing focused on the reliability and validity of the HSM-SEWS instrument. Reliability was assessed using Cronbach's alpha. Exploratory factor analysis with oblique promax rotation was used to examine validity and test hypothetical associations. Eighty-nine HIV-positive women were recruited and asked to complete the scale every four weeks for a total of 16 weeks. Factor analysis supported a one-factor solution explaining 93% of the variance among items. Internal consistency of the nine items was found to range from 0.83 to 0.93, with an overall Cronbach's alpha of 0.92. Psychometric analyses suggest that the HSM-SEWS is a reliable and valid instrument that measures the self-efficacy of symptom management behavior in women with HIV/AIDS and can be used during interventions and in studies targeting this area of health care research.