General, Health-Specific, and Housing-Specific Self-Efficacy Scales: Preliminary Reliability and Validity Evidence with Homeless or Vulnerably Housed Adults

Abstract

Self-efficacy (SE) refers to one’s sense of personal competence and is a key element of human agency. Among individuals who are homeless or vulnerably housed, SE has the potential to provide important information about an individual’s ability to seek out and make use of resources and persevere in the face of multiple challenges. SE is understudied as a personal variable in research with homeless samples. Thus, it is important to identify appropriate measures of general and domain-specific SE for this population and evaluate their psychometric properties. Three relevant SE scales are the Generalized Self Efficacy Scale, Perceived Health Competence Scale, and Housing Self-Efficacy Scale. The purposes of this study were to examine the internal structure and score reliability for each of these SE scales, report performance on and intercorrelations among the SE scales, and examine the relationship of demographic variables to SE scale scores, with a sample of adults who were homeless or vulnerably housed. Strict unidimensionality was evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis. Model fit was examined using fit indices and residual polychoric correlation matrices. Essential unidimensionality was evaluated using exploratory factor analysis and the ratio of first to second eigenvalues. Internal consistency estimates of reliability were obtained using ordinal alpha. None of the SE measures were found to be strictly unidimensional but all three measures were found to be essentially unidimensional. This finding supported the use of total scores for each measure. Ordinal alphas ranged from .87 to .93 for the three SE measures and thus were satisfactory. Correlations among the three measures ranged from .36 to .45. Demographic variables showed little relationship to the three SE measures. The study findings provided initial psychometric evidence to support the use of these three SE measures with a homeless or vulnerably housed adult sample.