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Question: Hi
I work for a community based housing provider in Australia. I want to ask our tenants when they enter housing and during their time with us questions about how the provision of safe and secure tenure housing enables the following: Quality of life; Ability to access services; Stability to enable education and look at work possibilities
Community connections; Reduced stress and positive impact on health. I was perhaps thinking of using a self efficacy approach that the provision of housing increases the tenants ability/confidence/security. Ideally want to ask about 5/6 questions we can track over time and by different tenant types age/location/etc. Do you know of any self-efficacy questions that cover these items or are similar so we can adapt? Thank you so much
Answer:

Cheers Terry,

 
First, welcome to the Community Tool Box and Ask an Advisor, hopefully we can provide you with timely, directly applicable, and useful information that will help you develop your self-efficacy questionnaire. Second, all apologies for my late reply, things were a little hectic of late and I've finally gotten myself sorted so I can devote my attention to you and yours. To be honest, I'm pretty excited about your query because I've never encountered this topic while serving as an advisor so many thanks to you for bringing it to us; I'm sure there are other visitors to the CTB who have an interest in tenure housing and self-efficacy.
 

Well, I decided to first go outside of the CTB to see if I could find anything using Google Scholar (my default search engine) and guess what? First try, woohoo, found this link to a PDF that has a number of self-efficacy scales from which you can adapt your questions: http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=soc... (this is a 2014 thesis from Georgia State University entitled "Public Housing Relocation and Its Effect on Residents' Self-esteem and Self-efficacy by Amanda Dorrington). I rooted around in the CTB, but didn't find anything therein. So, when you access this PDF you'll be able to readily find the self-efficacy scales via the table of contents as they're all listed. The article might prove an instructive read for you as well to get a sense of how the scales were constructed and implemented. It will take a bit of sorting, but I'm pretty confident you'll find 5 or 6 suitable questions for the task at hand.

 
With that Terry, I thank you again for visiting the CTB and your most interesting and challenging question. I hope we've provided you with the resource you need to construct an appropriate scale, if not, please come back and we'll work together to come up with a more suitable answer. Take care, be well, do good work!
 

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Question Date: Fri, 05/13/2016