Background: The measurement of physical activity habits is especially important in the evaluation of the consequences of chronic diseases. The study tries was to validate to the context Spanish the scale Self-Report Habit Index (SRHI) of 12 items for to measure the habit strength.
Methods: The psychometric properties of SRHI were analyzed realizing a analysis statistical of the items, an factorial analysis and an estimation of the reliability coefficient via Cronbach alpha. A sample of 222 university students of first year was used. The majority of they has practiced some type of sport during his school stage. To assess the adequacy of sampling and possible sphericity of data obtained, both Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) tests were performed (which resulted in 0.953) and Bartlett (which resulted in p=.000).
Results: The Cronbach alpha coefficient is 0.96. The results of a factor mining analysis (unrotated, orthogonal) point to a grouping of the 12 items into a single factor with eigenvalue of 8.342 and a percentage of total variance of 69.52%.
Conclusions: Results show that the scale is valid and reliable to measure physical activity habits A clear similarity of the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the original version SRHI is shown.