PURPOSE
The purpose of this study was to develope a tool to assess mothers' behavior related to health promotion if their preschool children had disabillties.
METHOD
The research design was a methodological study. This tool was developed in 4 stages: first, a content matrix as a conceptual framework was developed using Gordon's 11 functional health promotion patterns and 5 categories (Lee, Jung & An, 1996); second, 40 preliminary items were selected through references and interviews with 9 mothers of children with disabilities; third, 2 items were discarded after content validity was done by 3 experts; fourth, reliability and validity were tested with a sample of 243 mothers of children with disabilities who were of preschool age.
RESULTS
The final tool consisted of 19 items and Cronbach's alpha coefficient for internal consistency was .82. Five factors were extracted by factor analysis and they explained 55.58% of the total variance.
CONCLUSIONS
This tool was identified to have a high degree of reliability and validity. So it can be utilized to assess mothers' behavior in providing health promotion for their children who have disabilities.
