Attitude towards health promotion in university students. Construction and validation of a scale.

Objective: To construct and validate a questionnaire about the attitude of university students toward health promotion.

Method: A cross-sectional study. A questionnaire of 14 questions was designed and administered to 1486 first-year undergraduates. The principal axes factoring method with oblique rotation was applied and a confirmatory factor analysis was carried out. Reliability was calculated through internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha and item-total correlation for the global scale and its subscales.

Results: A 14-item scale was constructed, with two dimensions. Its Cronbach's alpha was 0.872, and 0.852, and 0.718 for its subscales. The adjustment values of the confirmatory factor analysis were adequate.

Conclusions: The attitude towards health promotion scale has shown to have adequate psychometric properties. It is an instrument that will help to detect referents and health assets for future interventions.