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The demographic ageing of western societies represents a major challenge for health and social care in the 21st century. Birth rates are decreasing and older people are living longer and being healthier in old age. This changing demography will have major implications for the way we work, for family and intergenerational relationships, social networks and political, economic and consumer behaviour. It will also have an affect on the delivery of medical, health and social services and welfare support. Deploying geographical information systems (GIS) within administrative healthcare systems creates a new opportunity to see the whole picture and to better manage available resources. In Gävle, Sweden, several projects are focusing on these issues with the common goal to prolong the time that older people are able to live at home instead of moving into nursing homes. These projects are gathered under the name Open eHome Care.

Almost all historical accounts of psychological work related to the self-concept begin with the pioneering work of William James (e.g., Harter, 1996; Pajares & Schunk, 2002, 2005; Roeser et al., 2006). James' distinction between the self as knower and agent (the I-self) and the self as known and object (the Me-self), in the famous Chap. 10, on self-consciousness, in his Principles of Psychology (1890), undoubtedly informs much subsequent work on the self-concept (a term that James never used himself). In particular, the general idea that the self is made up of different constituents (e.g., the Me-self contains material, social, and spiritual selves) arranged hierarchically is still very much a basic structural assumption in many contemporary theories of the self-concept, just as James' assumption that the I-self can create and monitor a variety of Me-selves anchors much self-concept methodology and process theorizing. With respect to the general aims of self-concept research, James' framing of self-esteem (a term he did use) also has been extremely influential on subsequent generations of both self-esteem and self-concept researchers. For James, self-esteem is a feeling that “depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do” (James, 1981, p. 310), a feeling that depends on the success with which we achieve those things we set out to achieve.²

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate measurement properties of a scale measuring fashion self-congruity (FSC).

Based on the existing literature of self-congruity, and four studies carried out as a part of this research, the FSC scale has been validated in a step-by-step process following the scale validation methodology suggested by Churchill (1979).

The final version of the scale incorporates nine items classified into three dimensions: actual fashion self-congruity, ideal fashion self-congruity, and ideal social fashion self-congruity. The scale reveals strong psychometric properties based on findings of different reliability and validity tests.

A valid and reliable FSC scale provides a foundation to broaden quantitative inquiry into the types of FSC that consumers seek under different situations. Knowledge of the dominant self-concept driving the consumption of fashion in various situations will enable marketers to position their brands along the desired dimension of FSC.

The value of this research paper lies in validating a scale to measure FSC for the first time in the self-concept/congruity literature.