Self-efficacy plays a fundamental role in preparing students for clinical practice. The Physiotherapist Self-Efficacy (PSE) questionnaire was developed to evaluate this aspect in physical therapy students. This dataset was created to validate the translation and cultural adaptation of the questionnaire into Spanish from Spain (PSE-sp).

A two-phase study was conducted following international guidelines for the translation process and the evaluation of the psychometric properties of the PSE-sp. Undergraduate physiotherapy students from the University of Lleida and the University of Malaga took part in the study. After completing the translation, the psychometric properties—including structural validity, internal consistency, test–retest reliability, measurement error, convergent validity, and known-groups validity—were assessed.

The PSE-sp assesses self-efficacy beliefs related to learning content within the field of physiotherapy through 13 items. Original version in English (Australia) was validated. The self-efficacy belief was evaluated with a Likert scales (1 = very low confidence; 5 = very high confidence). The instrument takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. The General Self-Efficacy Scale (Spanish version) was used as a reference measure.