Psychometric Characteristics of Form B of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale in Iran

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Psychometric Characteristics of Form B of the
Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale in
Iranian Youth

• Mahdi Moshki, PhD
• Fazlollah Ghofranipour, PhD
• Parviz Azadfallah, PhD
• Ebrahim Hajizadeh, PhD
• I.R.IRAN

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• Health Locus of Control (HLC) is one of the most
  commonly used parameters of health belief in
  planning the health education programs. It is the
  degree to which individual believe that his or
  her behavior is controlled by external or
  internal factors.

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• Multidimensional Health Locus of control
  Scales(MHLCS) have been used as one of the most
  efficient measures of healthrelated beliefs for
  more than a quarter of a century. Wallston,
  Wallston, DeVellis (1978) deserve the acclaim
  to have applied successfully Rotter's basic idea
  to the health domain.
• MHLC
• Internal
• Powerful others
• Chance

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Multidimensional Health Locus of control Scales

• Forms A and B General Health Status
• Wallston etal 1978
• Form C Disease specific Wallston, Stein
  Smith, 1994
• God Locus of Health control Scale Wallston
  etal 1999

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Form B

• If I become sick, I have the power to make
  myself well again.
• Often I feel that no matter what I do, if I am
  going to get sick, I will get sick.
• If I see an excellent doctor regularly, I am less
  likely to have health problems.
• It seems that my health is greatly influenced by
  accidental happenings.

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Form B

• I can only maintain my health by consulting
  health professionals.
• I am directly responsible for my health.
• Other people play a big part in whether I stay
  healthy or become sick.
• Whenever goes wrong with my health is my own
  fault.

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Method

• Participants The participants of this study were
  448 students majoring in different courses of
  medical sciences in Gonabad and Tehran
  Universities. It should be mentioned that the 448
  students, 32.7 percent of whom were male and 67.3
  percent were female, were randomly selected from
  all above courses. They had also a mean age of
  22.4 years (SD2.45). All participated willingly
  and voluntarily in this study and all completed
  the questionnaires in full. Students completed
  the paper-and-pencil instruments in a classroom,
  which was staffed by research assistants who were
  available to answer questions if necessary.

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Method

• Procedure The Persian translated version of Form
  B was administered to the sample for determining
  of concurrent, construct, predictive validity and
  so internal consistency, test-retest, parallel
  forms of reliability methods.

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Results

• Content validity As a described in Procedure
  section, we established by faithfully translating
  (and then back- translating) each item from the
  English into the Persian version. Items were
  modified based on input received from the panel
  of experts and the students in the pilot studies.
  The resulting questionnaire contained 18 items.
• Concurrent validity The obtained results
  indicated significant correlation coefficients
  between the two scale factors i.e., .58 for
  Internal (Plt0.001), .51 for Powerful Others
  (Plt0.001), and .60 for Chance (plt0.001).

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Results

• Predictive validity As expected and is reported
  in Table 1, health status correlated positively
  with IHLC (r .38, plt0.01), negatively with CHLC
  (r -.22, plt0.006) and did not correlate with
  PHLC (r .03).
• Construct validity
• Exploratory Factor analysis
• Correlation analysis Table 1 presents the
  intercorrelation matrix for Form B and with
  health status.

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Results
Table 1 Intercorrelations of Form B subscales and
health status
IHLC PHLC CHLC
. Correlation is equal 0.01 . Correlation is
equal 0.006
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Results

• Test retest
• The reliability indices for the Internal, Chance,
  and Powerful Others and measure of health status
  using Pearson's moment correlation were .68
  (plt0.001), .65 (plt0.001), .76 (plt0.001), and .79
  (plt0.001), respectively (Table 2).
• Parallel forms
• Internal Consistency

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Results
Table2. Descriptive data on scales
Scale Item
Mean SD Alpha
IHLC 6
26.01 4.34
.70 CHLC 6
15.62 4.94 .69
PHLC 6 21.24
5.22 .72
Health Status 2
10.98 1.88 .76

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Conclusion

• The results indicated that psychometric
  properties of Persian Form B of MHLC estimated
  acceptable and respectable in part of Iranian
  youth. These findings will assist professional
  health educators to develop educational
  interventions which should be designed to support
  and strengthen students ability to recognize in
  understanding and predicting health behaviors.

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