An instrument for measuring pharmacist and physician attitudes towards collaboration: Preliminary psychometric data

Abstract

This study was designed to develop an instrument for measuring attitudes toward pharmacist-physician collaborative relationships for administration to practicing pharmacists and physicians, as well as to students in pharmacy and medical schools. Based on a review of literature, a preliminary version of an instrument was developed (30 items), and through a pilot study of face validity and content validity with 12 pharmacists and 10 physicians, 18 items were chosen for quantitative analyses. We asked 88 respondents (61 pharmacists, 27 physicians) to judge the relevance, clarity, and representativeness of each item to the concept of pharmacist-physician collaborative relationships. Sixteen items with a relevancy endorsement greater than 85% and significant item-total score correlations were retained. The following underlying constructs emerged from factor analysis: “collaboration and team work,” “accountability,” “overlapping responsibility,” and “authority”. These factors supported the multidimensionality and construct validity of the instrument. No gender difference was observed; however, pharmacists scored higher than physicians on the total score of the instrument. The Cronbach's coefficient alpha was .81 for pharmacists, .92 for physicians, and .87 for the combined sample. Encouraged by these preliminary findings, we plan to undertake further research to examine the instrument's psychometric properties including criterion-related and predictive validities with larger and more representative samples of pharmacists, physicians, and students in pharmacy and medical schools.

Keywords:

• Interprofessional collaboration
• interprofessional education
• physician
• pharmacist
• attitude
• scale development
• psychometrics

Acknowledgments

We would to thank Wolfgang H. Vogel, PhD, emeritus professor of pharmacology, for his significant input in the initial stages of the development of the instrument. We would also like to thank Carla Vogel, Joseph Justino, Jaleh Shahriari, and Mojgan Farzaneh-Evoghlian for their help in distributing the instruments to pharmacists, and Dorisa Bolinski for her editorial assistance. Special thanks to Anna Simoes for her assistance in literature search.

Declaration of Interest

The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.