Validity and reliability of a questionnaire on lifestyle changes in students from six universities in the American continent

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to validate a scale to measure the lifestyle changes of university students during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study applied a transversal methodology; it gathered information from 1.781 students from Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Peru and the United States by using the virtual platform Qualtrics. A statistical analysis was carried out with the Kaiser Meyer Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett´s test of sphericity. Aditionally, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was also used, and the probable resulting factors were extracted by means of the analysis of the main components, the Varimax rotation. The results of this study show that the Scale of Changes in Lifestyle (Escala de Cambios en el Estilo de Vida, ECEV, given its Spanish acronym) during the quarantine is a reliable and acceptable instrument.