Self-care appraisal in nursing assistant students: Adaptation, validation and psychometric properties of the Spanish ASAS

Abstract

The core implication of nursing professionals’ labor is promoting self-care and foster well-being among healthcare service users. The beginning of the healing process starts with the provider, and self-care habits are needed to positively impact on patients’ care outcomes at different spheres. Overall, current literature supports the idea that nurses’ personal self-care should be a necessary skill to be expected in their professional role. In this regard, the Appraisal of Self-care Agency Scale (ASAS) is a worldwide known instrument aimed at assessing the ability to engage in self-care. However, it has never been tested in the Spanish context before, and much less in nursing practitioners or apprentices. The aim of this study was to translate, adapt and validate the ASAS for Spanish nursing apprentices, assessing its dimensionality, psychometric properties and convergent validity by means of the Sense of Coherence (SOC-13) questionnaire. Methods: Data were collected from a random sample of 921 Certificated Nursing Assistant (CNA) Spanish students and was analyzed trough confirmatory factor analyses via structural equation models. The core ASAS construct and its subscales were correlated with the SOC-13 scores. Results: Fair psychometric properties for the questionnaire were set. Also, SEM models endorse the validity and reliability of the four-factor dimensionality of the Spanish adaptation of the ASAS, whose associations to SOC scores were coherent and significant. Conclusion: This study allowed to establish that the Spanish version of the ASAS might be a useful tool for addressing self-care-related issues among nursing apprentices, a key population for promoting both their own and patients’ health and welfare through healthy and care-related behaviors.

Self-Care and Sense of Coherence: A Salutogenic Model for Health and Care in Nursing Education

“…The descriptive analysis of the sample has already been published in Colomer-Pérez & Useche [ 68 ]). Therefore, in the present paper, we limit ourselves to carrying out: (1) the correlation tests (Pearson) in order to assess the bivariate relationships among the key study variables; and (2) an analysis of variance (ANOVA) in order to compare the academic outcomes according to the different sense of coherence (SOC) and self-care agency (ASAS) degrees.…”

“…This questionnaire has been translated and adapted/validated to several languages in Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Both versions of the scale have been validated in studies conducted in Brazil [ 64 ], Colombia [ 65 ], and others [ 66 , 67 ], and it has also been recently validated for the Spanish population [ 68 ]. The scale consists of 24 items developed on a Likert scale with five alternatives, one being “Strongly disagree,” which coincides with the lowest value of self-care agency, and the 5, “Strongly agree,” being the highest.…”

Validation and Psychometric Analysis of the German Translation of the Appraisal of Self-Care Agency Scale-Revised

“…However, their overall factor loadings and internal consistency of the factors were comparable to the present results, regardless of the different item attribution. Of note, they only had a sample size of 150 people, while a Spanish translation by Colomer-Pérez and Useche [ 70 ] on 900 students revealed four factors. Overall, these results suggest that the factor structure of the ASAS and its revised or translated versions is not universal and differs between datasets.…”

Propiedades psicométricas de la “Escala de valoración de la capacidad de autocuidado” en adolescentes mexicanos

“…En principio, esta escala consta de 24 ítems con 9 ítems en sentido inverso, y fue propuesta como unidimensional. Sin embargo, estudios posteriores han propuesto otras estructuras para esta escala, incluyendo una estructura de cinco factores ("recursos", "ignorancia", "comportamientos en salud", "conciencia en salud" y "capacidades") y una de tres factores ("teniendo poder de autocuidado", "desarrollando poder de autocuidado" y "careciendo de poder de autocuidado"), que han sido propuestas con participantes adultos y confirmadas en estudios posteriores (19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24). Sin embargo, algunos de los factores de estas propuestas se conforman de ítems inversos, lo cual no se recomienda actualmente en la literatura (25).…”