Date of Award

Fall 9-4-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology (PhD)

Department

Clinical Psychology

First Advisor/Committee Member

Munyi Shea

Second Advisor/Committee Member

Jessica Fossum

Third Advisor/Committee Member

Jennifer S. Harris

Abstract

Self-care is a topic that has piqued the interest of researchers in recent years with much of the focus being on specific subsets of the population such as helping professions and those with chronic conditions. This trend has been consistent when it comes to the development of measures intended to evaluate people’s self-care practices. Designed with Butler and colleagues’ (2019) self-care model in mind, the Assessment of Self-Care (ASC) was developed to broadly assess self-care practices in the general U.S. adult population. This study discusses the development and initial validation of the ASC. After the item generation phase, exploratory factor analysis was conducted (N = 385, aged 18-85, 53.8% female, 66.8% White/Caucasian) and resulted in a five-factor solution, including the following domains: basic/physical, work, relational, emotional/psychological, and spiritual. Thereafter, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted and fit indices showed promising results for the ASC. Reliability coefficients provided further support for the final structure of the ASC. Researchers are encouraged to continue the psychometric evaluation process to determine the suitability of this measure for future use.

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