A Privacy Issues Scale for Social Workers

Summary

The development, rationale, and evaluation of a privacy issues scale are described. The scale contains 15 items designed to assess one's opinions on five topic areas (subscales) of privacy: value of privacy, communication and legality, personal privacy preferences, confidentiality of records, and information. Each of the five subscales contains three items which are scored on a five-point Likert-type scale. The scale was administered to 43 male and female graduate social work students to test for the internal consistency of each subscale, and high alpha coefficients were obtained for each subscale. The subscales were not correlated with one another which suggests their independence. To test for temporal stability, the scale was administered twice to 19 of the students. High correlation coefficients were produced between time 1 and time 2 for each of the items. Thus, a short, internally consistent and stable scale was developed to measure five specific privacy issues.