Validity and reliability of the seizure self-efficacy scale for children with epilepsy

The target population of the study was all the children with epilepsy who attended the Pediatric Neurology Clinic of Akdeniz University Hospital, the Child Neurology Clinic of Antalya Training and Research Hospital, and the Pediatric Neurology Clinic of Bursa Dortcelik Children's Hospital between July 2012 and March 2013. The study sample consisted of 166 children (aged 9-17 years) with a diagnosis of epilepsy for at least 6 months, who received treatment and follow-up care in the above-mentioned policlinics. The subjects, who had no mental disabilities or other chronic diseases, were attending school and they agreed to participate in the study. All research data were collected by a researcher in face-to-face interviews using Child Information Form, Seizure Self-Efficacy Scale for Children and Children's Depression Scale. The Seizure Self-Efficacy Scale for Children is a 15-item, 5-point Likert scale designed by Caplin et al. (2002) to measure the degree of self-efficacy experienced by children related to the management of their seizure disorder. All the items of the scale were found positive and alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was 0.93. The linguistic adaptation and validation of the scale was conducted by six experts. To evaluate the content validity of the scale, we elicited judgments from a panel of 10 content experts. The expert judgments showed that the correlation between the items on the scale was fairly good (p = 0.000). The results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that the items were loaded on two factors accounting for 49.67% of the total variance explained. We calculated Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the internal consistency and the full-scale score showed good internal consistency (alpha 0.89). Within the context of reliability studies, it was found correlations varying between 0.98-0.74 for the two sub-factors of the scale. Test/retest correlation coefficients were significant (p<0.01) and high (r=0.99). In parallel forms reliability, the correlations between the Seizure Self-Efficacy Scale for Children and Children's Depression Rating Scale were found to be negative, moderate and statistically significant. The measurements conducted on the Turkish version of the Seizure Self-Efficacy Scale for Children showed that it is consistent with the original scale, valid and reliable for Turkish society. It was concluded that the adapted Turkish version of the scale can be used in children with epilepsy in Turkish society and it can effectively evaluate the self-efficacy levels of these children. Keywords: Self-Efficacy, Epilepsy, Child, Validity and Reliability.