Exploring the Validity and Reliability of the Instrument in Measuring the Willingness to Change in Regular Smokers

Abstract

This article describes the process of adapting the University of Rhode Island Change Assessment (URICA) to the Bolivian sociocultural context. The study was conducted with a sample of 402 subjects of both sexes, aged between 14 and 80, all habitual smokers, residents of the city of La Paz. The adapted URICA, whose original frame of reference is the Transteoretic Model of Change, released by Prochaska and DiClemente, consists of a Likert-type scale of 32 items with five response options. The instrument has basically been used to identify the position of a person in a continuum of stages that include the process of change: precontemplation, contemplation, maintenance and action. The factor validity obtained with the Varimax rotation method confirmed a multifactorial structure of URICA, with only three components being extracted (Pre-contemplation, Contemplation and Action) despite the fact that the original instrument comprised four factors. The rotation produced saturations greater than .370, accounting for 42.389 percent of the total variance. Likewise, the reliability calculations show an acceptable consistency of the instrument, yielding an alpha coefficient of .86 (with values ​​of .63 for the pre-contemplation stage, .86 for contemplation and .84 for action). The present study also offers conclusions and recommendations to improve the conditions and applicability of the adapted instrument.