Development of an instrument to assess maternal childhood injury health beliefs and social influence.

Unintentional home related injuries are a major cause of morbidity and mortality among children under the age of five years. Injury incidence in homes for these children continues at high levels despite injury prevention education programs for their caregivers. This article reports the development of an instrument that assesses injury prevention health beliefs and social influence perceptions in mothers of young children. Based on the Health Belief Model, the tool is composed of six scales that measure injury susceptibility and seriousness, benefits and barriers of injury prevention, self efficacy of injury prevention performance, and social influence. Reliability measurements showed that all scales produced high Cronbach alphas (.83 to .98) and significant test-retest correlations (.30 to .62, p < or = .05). Criterion related validity was established (-.36 to -.59, p < or = .05) for all scales except the seriousness scale. This instrument has utility for nursing investigations on the predictors of injury prevention behavior and for development of nursing interventions to prevent injuries in young children.