Development of a Multidimensional Attitude Scale for Organ Donation Research: An Example from China

ABSTRACT

This research refined the notion of attitude based on the reasoned action perspective of organ donation research at both the conceptual and the operational levels in the Chinese context. In Study 1, a multidimensional attitude scale was developed based on the salient beliefs of the Chinese toward registering to become an organ donor, and the scale’s reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity were established. The results of Study 1 indicated that the attitudes toward registering to become an organ donor consisted of two statistically independent dimensions, namely, positive and negative attitudes. In Study 2, the predictive validity of the multidimensional attitude scale was confirmed, and the results indicated that negative attitudes, positive attitudes, and subjective norms significantly impacted behavioral intention, which, in turn, predicted organ donor registration behavior.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Dr. Charles T. Salmon, Dr. Sandi W. Smith, Dr. Hye Kyung Kim, Dr. Christopher Cummings, and Dr. Theng Yin Leng for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹ CFAs and multi-group CFAs with the robust maximum likelihood (MLM) estimator were performed using Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2015). Robust maximum likelihood (MLM) estimation is capable of estimating “maximum likelihood parameter estimates with standard errors and a mean-adjusted chi-square test statistic that are robust to non-normality” (Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2015, p. 607). For the chi-square difference tests for the CFAs employed the MLM estimator, the calculation of chi-square differences followed the steps in Byrne (2012), CD = (df _M1* C _M1 - df _M2* C _M2)/(df _M1 - df _M2), $\mathrm{\Delta }{\chi }^2$ = (${\chi }^2$_M1 * C_M1 - ${\chi }^2$ _M2 * C_M2)/CD, C refers to scaling correction factor for MLM.