The Healthy Lifestyle Scale for University Students: development and psychometric testing

Abstract

We report the development and validation of a scale to evaluate the healthy lifestyles of university students. The Delphi technique was used to determine the content validity of the scale with a panel of 33 experts. Psychometric testing was performed and confirmed with 6000 undergraduate students who were randomly selected from 10 universities in China. Three Delphi rounds were required to achieve final consensus for content validity. The split-half correlation coefficient and Cronbach’s α coefficient for the total scale were 0.841 and 0.892, respectively. Construct validity was supported by exploratory factor analysis, which yielded an eight-factor instrument that explained 55.02% of the variance in the 38 items. The proposed Healthy Lifestyle Scale for University Students has good construct validity and reliability and can be used as an evaluation tool for health counselling in university health centres.