Development and Validation of a Scale Measuring Humanistic Professional Awareness for Healthcare Students and Providers

Abstract

Objective

This study aimed to develop an appropriate scale accessing healthcare students’ and providers’ humanistic professional awareness (HPAS-HSP).

Methods

Following a literature review, stakeholder interviews, and panel discussions for item generation, 65 items for the HPAS-HSP scale were created based on a nine-point Likert scale, with 9 indicating “strongly agree” and 1 indicating “strongly disagree.” A pilot study using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), with seven hundred twenty-five medical care students and providers in Taiwan as the total sample number of the study, was administered to examine the practicability of the HPAS-HSP scale. The statistics software SPSS and AMOS 24.0 were used to examine the psychometric properties of the scale, including internal consistency, convergent validities, discriminant validities, and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.

Results

The EFA resulted in 21 items in three factors, with 66.221% of the total variance explained: “personal integrity and accountability” (9 items; 51.763% of the variance explained), “sensitivity to others” (6 items; 8.667% of the variance explained), and “medical professional competence” (6 items; 5.791% of the variance explained). The Cronbach’s alphas for the three subscales and the entire questionnaire ranged from 0.892 to 0.949. The CFA results yielded 20 items, with the same three factors, and demonstrated good model fit in the χ²/df ratio (1.130; p = 0.140), CFI (0.998), TFI (0.998), and RMSEA (0.013). The composite alphas ranged between 0.900 and 0.969. Convergent and discriminant validity also confirmed the stability and consistency of the scale.

Conclusion

The statistical results demonstrated that the HPAS-HSP scale can be a measure to assess healthcare students’ and providers’ humanistic professional awareness.

Keywords:

• humanistic professional awareness
• healthcare students and providers
• scale development
• psychometric properties

Acknowledgments

The researchers thank all the participants in the study.

Disclosure

The authors declare no conflicts of interest for this work.