Psychometric examination of an adult self-report self-management inventory

The purposes of this study were (a) to examine the psychometric properties of an adult self-report inventory, the Self-description Form (SDF), measuring broad-spectrum self-management effectiveness, and (b) to make recommendations for the further development of the instrument. The 56-item SDF quantifies self-management effectiveness in terms of the self-reported occurrence of effective behaviors and nonoccurrence of ineffective behaviors across broad dimensions of life activities. The dimensions are represented in four proposed subscales: Work, Social, Health, and Leisure. A Total self-management score is computed by totalling the subscale scores.

The SDF was administered to 16A0 participants, 1025 college and technical school students and 615 nonstudents, from diverse economic, occupational, and geographic backgrounds, ages, and levels of presumed self-management effectiveness. The SDF was found to be sufficiently temporally reliable for group comparisons and modestly internally reliable with the deletion of the 17 self-management items with less than .20 corrected item-total scale correlations. The Health subscale, first, and the Work subscale, second, were the most construct valid of the subscales as evidenced in their correlations with the Total scale; power to distinguish among poor, average, and good self-managers; and relationships with related respondent and external criterion measures. The content validity of the Leisure subscale was highly questionable, although this subscale was the most internally reliable. Serious measurement problems existed with the Social subscale, but its internal consistency reliability was adequate for scale retention. Factor analytic clusters within the instrument were weak but suggestive of three of the original subscales. The study's major finding was that logical derivation has provided the SDF an excellent beginning for the next stages of scale construction. The general recommendation was that this examination should represent the foundation for more extensive investigation and empirical derivation combined with a rational approach in instrument development. Specific recommendations were made for immediate minor revisions, further psychometric examination, and possible future major revisions of the SDF.