Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Dec 15, 2021
Date Accepted: Mar 30, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Development and Validation of a Momentary Self-Regulation Scale
ABSTRACT
Background:
Self-regulation refers to a person’s ability to manage their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes to achieve long-term goals. Most prior research has examined self-regulation at the individual-level, but individual-level assessments does not allow examining dynamic patterns of intra-individual variability in self-regulation and and thus cannot aid in understanding potential malleable processes of self-regulation that may occur in response to daily environment.
Objective:
The aim of the study was to advance the scope of self-regulation measurements by developing a brief, psychometrically sound momentary self-regulation scale that can be practically administered through participants’ mobile devices at a momentary level.
Methods:
The research was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, in a sample of 522 adults, we examined 23 previously validated assessments of self-regulation containing 594 items in total to evaluate the underlying structure of self-regulation via exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. We then selected 20 trait-level items to be carried forward to the second phase. In the second phase, we converted each item to a momentary question and piloted the momentary items in a sample of 60 adults over 14 days. Using results from the momentary pilot, we explored the psychometric properties of the items and assessed their underlying structure. We then proposed a set of subscale and total score calculations.
Results:
In the first phase, the selected individual-level items appeared to measure four factors of self-regulation. The factors identified were: perseverance, sensation seeking, emotion regulation, and mindfulness. In the second phase EMA pilot, the selected items demonstrated strong construct validity as well as predictive validity for health risk behaviors.
Conclusions:
Our findings provide a 12-item momentary self-regulation scale comprising four subscales designed to capture self-regulatory dynamics at a momentary level.
Citation
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Copyright
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