Methods: We obtained a convenience sample of 210 women with type 2 diabetes from two hospitals’ metabolism and endocrinology outpatient departments. Relevant information was collected by a structured questionnaire with 4 sections: individual characteristics and habits, the Urologic Health Self-management Scale, Short Form 36 (SF-36) Health Survey, and 13-item Patient Activation Measure (PAM-13). Collected information was used to examine the reliability and validity of the Urologic Health Self-management Scale. The SF-36 Health Survey and PAM-13 were used to examine the construct validity of the Urologic Health Self-management Scale. The 40 items included in the initial version of the Urologic Health Self-management Scale were generated by three researchers. The 41-item Urologic Health Self-management Scale was generated after the evaluations of the 40-item scale’s content validity and a pilot study. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to identify the latent factorial structure of the developed scale.
Results: The EFA resulted in a 34-item version scale with 8 aspects (factors) which explained 66.62% of the total variance. Based on the EFA results, we estimated the internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the 34-item Urologic Health Self-management Scale. A Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.88 and an Intra-class Correlation Coefficient (ICC) value of 0.99 were obtained. The construct validity of the developed scale was confirmed by obtaining significant Pearson correlation coefficients of the 34-item Urologic Health Self-management Scale with the SF-36 Health Survey (physical component summary r=0.41, p<0.01)/mental component summary r=0.22, p<0.01) and PAM-13 (r=0.33, p<0.01).
Conclusions: Adequate reliability and validity of the Urologic Health Self-management Scale were initially obtained from this study and can serve as a basis for further research. The multifactorial nature of urologic health self-management behaviors supports that more studies are needed to clarifying the underlying latent aspects of urologic health self-management. In the future, the Urologic Health Self-management Scale can be used in clinical practice and related research to assess women’s urologic health self-management behaviors or effects of relevant interventions.