Validation of the Health Locus of Control Scale in Medicine students
Keywords:
internal-external control; validation study; surveys and questionnairesAbstract
Introduction: Locus of control in health explains the perception of people about who of what control their health and the behaviors to ensure it.
Objective: To adapt and validate the health locus of control scale in Spanish in medical students.
Methods: An instrumental study was conducted The items were evaluated considering statistical measures, and percentiles were established for each dimension of the scale. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed to validate the internal structure. Reliability was evaluated with the McDonald’s omega coefficient.
Results: Item analysis showed that all items had a corrected homogeneity index >0.30, indicating an acceptable association with the other items that make up their factor. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using the diagonally weighted least squares method allowed for the evaluation of two models: an orthogonal model where the factors are not correlated and an oblique model where they are correlated. The factor loads of the oblique model are >0.30 for all items with respect to their factor, the lowest being that of item 1 (0.35). Also, the three factors have standardized coefficients between each other >0.30, both between internality and chance/luck (0.38), internality and other people (0.75), and between other people and chance/luck (0.79), which confirms the existence of an oblique model.
Conclusions: The analysis of the heath locus control scale in students of Medicine demonstrates that the instrument presents adequate indices of reliability and evidences of construct validity.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Juan Carlos Escudero-Nolasco, Eder Jesús Orihuela-Manrique, Cori Raquel Iturregui-Paucar, Víctor Juan Vera-Ponce, Norka Rocío Guillén-Ponce, Jenny Raquel Torres-Malca
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