Spanish version of "Self-Efficacy for Writing Scale" (SEWS)

Self-efficacy is a fruitful construct on psychological research, including the educational setting. The present study is focused on measuring the writing self-efficacy. Specifically, we translated into Spanish the "Self-Efficacy for Writing Scale" (SEWS; Bruning, Dempsey, Kauffman, McKim, & Zumbrunn, 2013) and assessed its psychometric properties on a sample of university students. Five hundred and twelve students (78% women, 22% men) from three different Spanish universities participated in our study. They filled a questionnaire that includes the Spanish version of SEWS, the General Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Self-Efficacy for Writing. Results of the Exploratory Factor Analysis has shown that SEWS keep their dimensionality in the Spanish version (explained variance of 65.86%), being composed by Ideation (alpha=.90), writing Conventions (alpha=.89), and Self-regulation of writing (alpha=.90). The correlations with the General Self-Efficacy Scale are high, but higher with the Self-Efficacy for Writing, outlining that are measuring the same construct. We also found than men report higher values on the overall SEWS and two of its dimensions (Ideation and Conventions). Finally, we discuss the implications of these results, point out the main limitations of our study, and suggest further research avenues.