Child's health self-concept scale: its development and psychometric properties.

The Child's Health Self-Concept Scale (CHSCS) is an instrument designed to measure the collection of perceptions a child has concerning health and health-related behaviors. Its development was based on perceptions of children regarding "healthy" and "unhealthy" children. The original instrument was critiqued, revised, and tested. The estimation of reliability and validity was accomplished through a sample of 940 children. Critical analyses of the findings led to the conclusions that the CHSCS had moderate stability and high internal consistency reliability, evidence of content validity, but no evidence of construct validity. Additional research is needed to evaluate its potential usefulness for nursing research and practice.