Design and psychometrics of a tool for measuring social cognitive factors related to the preventive behaviors toward Covid-19 in the society

With the emergence of new strains of Covid-19, the adoption of preventive behaviors is still considered a requirement to control this disease. Therefore, considering the importance of social cognitive factors in adopting various types of preventive behaviors, the present study was conducted to design and psychometrically measure the social cognitive factors related to Covid-19 preventive behaviors. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 526 people ages 18 and over with multi-stage stratified, cluster and random sampling in Isfahan, Iran in 2022. The questionnaire was validated and formulated in three stages: designing, creating and reducing items. After collecting information and creating a bank of items, qualitative and quantitative methods were used to calculate the tool's validity. Data analysis was done in SPSS23 software at a significance level of less than 0.05. In the present study, the average age score of the participants was 39.16 ± 11.48. The results related to the construct validity in the exploratory part show that the five factors (Outcome expectations, self-efficacy, social support, self-regulation and barrier self-efficacy) obtained have a specific value higher than one and range from 1.376 to 9.343. Correlation between factors shows that all factors have a relatively high relationship with each other (P < 0.05). According to the exploratory factor analysis, the final questionnaire contains 29 items and 5 constructs from socio-cognitive theory. The results showed that the thematically and technically designed tool has been prepared in an appropriate way for each of the structures and can accurately measure the structures of outcome expectations, self-efficacy, social support, self-regulation and barrier self-efficacy to explain the preventive behaviors of Covid-19 to evaluate.