HLTH 2500 Week 9 Measurement Plan Example

Making Self-Efficacy Countable for One Behavior: Items, a 0 to 100 Response Scale, an Observation Window and a Scoring Rule for Lunchtime Walking

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 2500: Theories of Health Behavior

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Making Self-Efficacy Countable for One Behavior: Items, a 0 to 100 Response Scale, an Observation Window and a Scoring Rule for Lunchtime Walking

The Construct and the Behavior

Self-efficacy refers to how capable a person believes they are of performing a specific behavior, including when conditions make it hard (Bandura, 1977). It cannot be observed directly, so it has to be measured through answers to questions. This plan builds a measure of self-efficacy for the Week 4 behavior, a brisk lunchtime walk of ten minutes or more on at least three workdays a week. The setting is a composite county government office building with about 400 employees.

The plan responds to the appraisal completed last week, which found that a widely used five-item exercise scale leaves the behavior undefined and uses general barriers (Marcus et al., 1992). This measure is built for the specified behavior and its own obstacles.

Step 1: Finding the Obstacles

Self-efficacy items should describe the situations that make the behavior hard for the people being measured (Bandura, 2006). Those situations are not known in advance, so the plan begins with a short elicitation step, following the approach used to build questionnaires for the theory of planned behavior (Francis et al., 2004). Twelve employees, chosen to include different departments, ages and job types, will each answer three open questions in a 15-minute interview: What makes it hard to take a walk at lunch here? What makes it easier? On which days would you be least likely to walk? The most frequently named obstacles become the items.

For planning purposes, this paper uses the obstacles most likely to appear, based on the workplace's conditions. The final list would be revised after the interviews.

Step 2: The Items

The stem defines the behavior completely, so every respondent rates the same thing:

"Below are situations that can make it hard to walk during your lunch break. For each one, rate how certain you are that you can take a brisk walk of 10 minutes or more on your lunch break, leaving from this building, three or more workdays a week for the coming month, even when that situation happens."

Each item is phrased in terms of capability, "how certain you are that you can," rather than intention or likelihood, because self-efficacy concerns what a person judges they can do (Bandura, 2006). The items cover several kinds of obstacle, so a worker who feels able to walk in the heat but not when a supervisor expects them nearby will show that pattern in the item scores.

Table 1

Draft Items

The list and its order are provisional; the elicitation interviews will set the final items.

Step 3: The Response Scale

Each item is answered on a scale from 0 ("cannot do at all") through 50 ("moderately certain can do") to 100 ("highly certain can do"), in steps of 10. Bandura (2006) recommends this 0 to 100 format because it registers differences in strength that a short scale would miss. One concern is that some respondents may not use eleven points reliably; a study of a five-point exercise self-efficacy scale found that collapsing some categories improved accuracy among women with limited literacy (Mendoza-Vasconez et al., 2018). To test this, the pilot will check whether respondents use the full range or cluster at a few points, and the plan allows collapsing to a 0 to 10 scale if they cluster.

Step 4: The Observation Window

Self-efficacy will be measured at three points: in the week before any program begins, which serves as the baseline; after the fourth week; and after the eighth. Each administration takes about five minutes on paper or online. The baseline is taken before workers receive any information about a walking program, so that answers are not raised by enthusiasm for an announced initiative.

Behavior will be recorded over the same windows: each worker logs qualifying walks daily, and a subset wears step counters to check that logged walks include a continuous 10-minute bout during the lunch period. This allows the self-efficacy score at baseline to be tested against walking over the following four weeks.

Step 5: The Scoring Rule

The self-efficacy score is the mean of the ten item ratings, giving a score from 0 to 100. Items left blank are not imputed; a score is calculated only if at least eight of ten items are answered, and the mean is taken over the answered items. A second, descriptive score counts how many items were rated 70 or above, which shows how many of the obstacles the worker feels able to overcome with reasonable certainty.

Item-level scores are also kept, because the program needs to know which obstacles are hardest. If the meeting item averages 30 while the heat item averages 70, the program should focus on meeting schedules rather than shade.

Step 6: Checking That the Measure Captures the Construct

The final check matters most. If the score correlates more strongly with general confidence than with walking, the measure has drifted toward the everyday sense of confidence rather than the construct the theory defines.

Table 2

Checks Before the Measure Is Used

The last check tests whether the measure captures self-efficacy for this behavior rather than general confidence.

Limits

The measure is built for one behavior at one workplace. It cannot be compared directly with general exercise self-efficacy scales used in other studies. It relies on self-report, and some workers may rate themselves highly to appear committed. The elicitation sample of twelve may miss obstacles faced by smaller groups, such as workers with disabilities or caregiving duties, which the pilot should check for.

Conclusion

The plan turns self-efficacy for lunchtime walking into a number through four bridges: obstacles found by asking workers, items phrased as capability against those obstacles, a 0 to 100 scale for strength and a rule that averages items into a score while keeping item-level detail. Its validity checks test whether the score reflects the construct the theory names rather than a neighboring idea.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191

Bandura, A. (2006). Guide for constructing self-efficacy scales. In F. Pajares & T. Urdan (Eds.), Self-efficacy beliefs of adolescents (pp. 307-337). Information Age Publishing.

Francis, J. J., Eccles, M. P., Johnston, M., Walker, A., Grimshaw, J., Foy, R., Kaner, E. F. S., Smith, L., & Bonetti, D. (2004). Constructing questionnaires based on the theory of planned behaviour: A manual for health services researchers. Centre for Health Services Research, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Marcus, B. H., Selby, V. C., Niaura, R. S., & Rossi, J. S. (1992). Self-efficacy and the stages of exercise behavior change. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 63(1), 60-66. https://doi.org/10.1080/02701367.1992.10607557

Mendoza-Vasconez, A. S., Marquez, B., Benitez, T. J., & Marcus, B. H. (2018). Psychometrics of the self-efficacy for physical activity scale among a Latina women sample. BMC Public Health, 18(1), Article 1097. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-5998-0