Development and psychometric properties of the Self-care Strategies Questionnaire

The study aim was to develop a measure of self-care strategies in the Latvian population and to examine its psychometric properties. The development process included three stages. Stage 1 comprised the development of the initial set of items, based on the literature review and one focus group. Stage 2 included a standard pretest of the questionnaire draft, followed by data collection in the frame of the National research program (project Nr. VPP-COVID-2020/1-0011), and the development of the final version of the questionnaire based on the psychometric analysis in Stage 3 (N = 1723, mean age 45.61, SD = 13.18, 1195 Latvian speaking, and 528 Russian speaking participants). The exploratory factor analysis indicated a multidimensional structure of the Self-care Strategies Questionnaire (SCS-Q) and identified four factors accounting for 60.07% of the variance of the Latvian version of the questionnaire and 52.64% of the Russian version. The final version of the Self-care Strategies Questionnaire (SCS-Q) consists of 17 items in four scales: Social Support, Spiritual Resources, Free Time Activities, and Time Management. The internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s α) of the scales varied from .79 to .88. Item-total correlations ranged between .75 and .81 for Time management, .56 and .75 for Social Support, .64 and .85 for Spiritual resources, and .51 and .60 for Free-time activities. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis was performed to verify the four-factor solution. The fit of the proposed model was optimal (χ2 (113) = 1037.83; CFI = .937; TLI = .924; RMSEA = .069 (90% CI [.065, .073]); SRMR = .046). The development of the SCS-Q constitutes a significant step towards the comprehensive measurement of self-care strategies in the Covid-19 pandemic. However, further validation study is necessary.