THE PARENT HEALTH BELIEF SCALES - REPLICATION IN AN URBAN CLINIC POPULATION

Health locus of control (HLC) has been used to operationalize general health motivation. This study was undertaken to evaluate the internal consistency and construct validity of Tinsley and Holtgrave's Parent H ealth Belief Scales (PHBS) as a measure of maternal HLC toward their c hildren's health. Five hundred mothers (71% of eligible consecutive ad missions) of newborns admitted to the normal newborn nursery of a larg e municipal teaching hospital were interviewed 24 to 72 hours after de livery. Principal components factor analysis of the PHBS did not suppo rt the originally hypothesized three-dimensional factor structure of t he PHBS. In addition, the original subscales did not have adequate int ernal consistency reliability. Further assessment of construct validit y by comparison with maternal preventive health behaviors showed some evidence of construct validity for the scales when compared with breas tfeeding behavior. When the three items written as reverse-coded Inter nality items are not reversed, a reliable seven-item Externality scale emerges which contains items originally thought to represent all thre e dimensions of HLC.