Development of a health habits scale

The present study is based on the assumption that health habits assessment can make a significant contribution to our understanding of physical and psychological well‐being. Thus, the purpose of this study was to develop an easily administered, conceptually sound, and psychometrically adequate health habits scale for use in nursing and health research. A self‐report scale consisting of 5 positive health items and 5 negative items was administered initially to a sample of more than 1500 American adults. Subsamples of this group were used in various psychometric evaluations of the scale. A second sample of more than 700 college and noncollege adults also completed the new health habits scale and a number of additional inventories thought to be related conceptually to the new scale. In general, the health scale showed high content validity, good agreement between self‐ and other‐ratings, strong test—retest reliability, and consistent evidence of concurrent and divergent validity. The strengths of the scale are its inclusion of both disease‐preventive and health‐promoting behaviors, its brevity, and its psychometric development.