The Adolescent Lifestyle Profile: development and psychometric characteristics.

Adolescents establish patterns of behavior and make lifestyle choices that affect their future health during their transition from childhood to adulthood. They struggle with behaviors, such as physical activity and nutrition, which will affect their risk of developing chronic diseases in adulthood. A comprehensive, easy to administer instrument is needed that is both research worthy and clinically useful in order to assess adolescent lifestyle behaviors and to plan interventions appropriately. The purpose of this paper is to report the development and testing of the Adolescent Lifestyle Profile (ALP), a Likert-type instrument to measure seven domains of a health-promoting lifestyle in adolescents. The ALP was modeled after the Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile II (HPLP II) and tested in a sample of early adolescents. Internal consistency reliability, including Cronbach's alpha, item to total correlations and subscale to total scale correlations and construct validity, including concurrent validity testing and factor analysis, indicated that the ALP is a reliable and valid scale that can be used to assess healthy lifestyle domains in adolescents.