Development, reliability and validation of the Diabetes Emotional Adjustment Scale in Spanish: preliminary findings

The development of instruments to measure emotional maladjustment in diabetic Hispanic populations has received little attention. We present the development and validation of the Diabetes Emotional Adjustment Scale in Spanish.

An eighteen-item self-administered scale was construed to assess emotional adjustment in Spanish-speaking diabetic patients and the psychometric properties of the scale were assessed. The scale was applied to a sample of sixty patients and scale scores were correlated with scores on a battery of Spanish versions of established measures of psychological distress, to assess concurrent validity. Test-retest reliability was established four years later re-examining thirty-eight of the initial sixty-patients sample.

Split-half reliability and test-retest reliability were satisfactory. There were significant correlations between the scale results and measures of depression, trait-anxiety, family adjustment, and locus of control of behavior. A principal component analysis with varimax rotation yielded a six-factor solution explaining 50.4 percent of the total variance.

The scale is useful as a screening instrument, but the confirmation of factor structure stability and the correlation of the scale results with objective measures of metabolic control, require further investigation.