Assessing adolescent self-efficacy in ‘body and health’ - Exploring the psychometric properties of the SEBH scale

Self-efficacy beliefs are significant predictors of achievement in education. However, majority of existing self-efficacy measures are rather ‘general’ and assess aggregated perceptions of students’ proficiencies within broad academic disciplines. Applying Rasch analysis, the present study explored the psychometric properties of the five-item ‘self-efficacy in body and health’ (SEBH) scale as administered to 1622 tenth-graders aged 15-16years in Norway. Based on our sample, the SEBH scale stood out as well targeted and reliable with acceptable overall fit to the partial credit parameterization of the polytomous unidimensional Rasch model. Except for a slightly reversed threshold in item 1, which could be explained by few persons located at low levels of self-efficacy, the locally independent items had ordered response categories and functioned in the same way for the different levels of relevant person factors. Adapting this scale to different fields of education would contribute to development of more specific measures of perceived capability.