We would like to know how confident you are in doing certain activities. For each of the following questions, please choose the number that corresponds to your confidence that you can do the tasks regularly at the present time.

Items (using the same format as above):

1. How confident are you that you can keep the fatigue caused by your disease from interfering with the things you want to do?
2. How confident are you that you can keep the physical discomfort or pain of your disease from interfering with the things you want to do?
3. How confident are you that you can keep the emotional distress caused by your disease from interfering with the things you want to do?
4. How confident are you that you can keep any other symptoms or health problems you have from interfering with the things you want to do?
5. How confident are you that you can do the different tasks and activities needed to manage your health condition so as to reduce you need to see a doctor?
6. How confident are you that you can do things other than just taking medication to reduce how much you illness affects your everyday life?

Scoring

The score for each item is the number circled. If two consecutive numbers are circled, code the lower number (less self-efficacy). If the numbers are not consecutive, do not score the item. The score for the scale is the mean of the six items. If more than two items are missing, do not score the scale. Higher number indicates higher self-efficacy.

Characteristics

Tested on 605 subjects with chronic disease.

Source of Psychometric Data

Stanford/Garfield Kaiser Chronic Disease Dissemination Study. Psychometrics reported in: Lorig KR, Sobel, DS, Ritter PL, Laurent, D, Hobbs, M. Effect of a self-management program for patients with chronic disease. Effective Clinical Practice, 4, 2001,pp. 256-262.

Comments

This 6-item scale contains items taken from several SE scales developed for the Chronic Disease Self-Management study. We use this scale now, as it is much less burdensome for subjects. It covers several domains that are common across many chronic diseases, symptom control, role function, emotional functioning and communicating with physicians. For internet studies, we add radio buttons below each number. There is another way that we use to format these items, which takes up less space on a questionnaire, shown in the PDF document (see PDF link at the bottom of this page). A 4-item version of this scale available in Spanish.

References

Lorig KR, Sobel, DS, Ritter PL, Laurent, D, Hobbs, M. Effect of a self-management program for patients with chronic disease. Effective Clinical Practice, 4, 2001,pp. 256-262.

To download this scale and scoring instructions, right click the link below with your mouse and "Save as" to you hard disk or desktop (for Windows), or double click (Mac):

Download PDF version