[Construction and Validation of a Chronic Kidney Disease Self-Care Scale]

As the prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) increases, it is important to understand the self-care behavior of CKD patients.

To construct a CKD self-care scale and evaluate its metric properties.

Through literature review and clinical experience, question items were constructed and validated using item analysis. Factors analysis was used to validate the reliability and validity of the resultant questionnaire in a cross-sectional study.

Six subscales containing a total of 20 items were extracted from the original CKD self-care scale using item and exploratory factor analysis. After performing three-time model goodness of fit, only five subscales including regular medication (5 items), diet control (4 items), regular exercise (3 items), smoking habits (2 items), and blood pressure management (2 items) were included in the final scale. The total explained variance of the final subscales was 74.96%. The reliability of the scale was examined and found to be satisfactory. Each absolute factor loading value fell between .72 and .94. The Cronbach's alpha for the overall scale was .83 and those for the five subscales were .83, .83, .94, .81, and .87, respectively.

Appropriate assessment tools that allow CKD health educators to evaluate the self-care behaviors of patients effectively are needed. The valid and reliable CKD self-care scale that was developed in the present study is able to assist CKD health educators to quickly evaluate the self-care behavior of patients and to make appropriate health plans.