Development and psychometric evaluation of a condom use self-efficacy measure in Spanish and English

Background: Condom self-efficacy is an important construct for HIV/STI prevention and intervention. A psychometrically sound measure of the self-efficacy for using condoms that has been designed for Hispanic women to respond in Spanish or English is needed.

Objectives: The goal of this study was to develop and evaluate a brief self-report measure of condom use self-efficacy.

Methods: We developed a 15-item measure of condom use self-efficacy based on expert knowledge of measurement and HIV/STI prevention with Hispanic women using a translation-back translation approach. Participants were 320 Hispanic women from the Southeastern US.

Results: Internal consistency of the full measure was 92. A short form of the instrument with a subset of five items also had acceptable internal consistency, alpha = .80, and was significantly correlated with the full scale, r_s = .93, p < .001. A single latent factor explained 9–48% of the variation in these items. Evidence of construct validity of the short form was provided by correlations of the scale with two self-report measures of condom use: r_s = .34** with condom use, r_s = .37** with condom use during vaginal sex.

Conclusions: Either the full measure or the five-item measure could be used in studies where condom use is an important behavioral outcome, such as evaluating prevention interventions, with Hispanic women. Future studies should examine the performance of this measure with other groups, including Hispanic men and members of other ethnic and language groups.