Construct Validity and Item Discrimination of The Diabetes Foot Self-Care Behavior Scale in Patients with Type-2 Diabetes

Abstract

Background: This study was planned to test the construct validity of the Turkish version of the Diabetes Foot Self-Care Behavior Scale (DFSBS) in patients with type-2 diabetes. Method: 119 type-2 diabetic patients (57 women; 62 men) with a mean age of 53.3±4.7 years were included in this study. The forward-backward translation of the DFSBS was conducted for translation from English to Turkish according to the methodology outlined by Beaton. The World Health Organization Well-being Questionnaire-22 (WBQ-22) and Nottingham Health Profile (NHP) were administered to the participants along with the DFSBS. Results: For convergent construct validity analysis, the correlations between the DFSBS score and WBQ-22 (r=0.639, p<0.001) and NHP total score (r=-0.200, p<0.029) were calculated with the Pearson correlation coefficient. The discriminative construct validity analysis showed that there is no difference between men and women in terms of scale scores. The exploratory factor analysis results showed that 75% of the total variance is explainable by two factors. The fit between the factor structure of the Turkish version and the original version was adequate as shown by the confirmatory factor analysis. Additionally, item discriminative power analysis showed that all items were able to discriminate ‘high’ and ‘low’ responses. Conclusion: The DFSBS is a rare scale that can assess and measure diabetic foot self-care behaviors in a person-centered approach with satisfactory construct validity. This scale can be used to assess self-care behaviors, plan interventions and education programs with diabetic foot clients.