Assessment of the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS): An item response theory analysis

ABSTRACT

This short report aims to bring evidence from modern psychometric methods to bear on a popularly deployed questionnaire in interprofessional education (IPE) assessment. Specifically, three interrelated problems raised against the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) are examined in a study with 280 medical and nursing student participants. Firstly, findings support RIPLS overall reliability, but fail to support subscale reliabilities. Secondly, findings indicate a strong, general factor underlying the RIPLS that supports unidimensional interpretations. Thirdly, findings support the RIPLS potential sensitivity to changes with appropriate lower ranges for our pre-training student sample. Recommendations for refinement to the RIPLS include: use of more appropriate reliability indices; factor generalizability; and a subset of items. More generally, refinement is possible, whereas RIPLS disuse or continued misuse with problematic scales is likely to hinder progress in the field of IPE.

KEYWORDS:

• Item response theory (IRT)
• measurement
• psychometrics
• readiness for interprofessional learning scale (RIPLS)
• self-report

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the writing and content of this article.

Notes

1. For an overview of several RIPLS translations, interested readers are referred to Luderer et al. (2017).

2. We combined ProID +/- subscale for purpose of demonstrating the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula. For complete reporting, however, we computed α for each ProID subscale and report them here as +ProID (4-item) = .88, and –ProID (3-item) = .82.

3. Interested readers are referred to coefficient omega’s original conceptualization (McDonald, 1978).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Tianjin Education Science Planning Projects in 13th Five-Year (Grant no. HE3094). It was also supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [81702233], and the Tianjin Nurse Association [Grant no. tjhlky20170204].