Development and psychometric testing of physiopsychological disorders scale for medical rescuers fighting epidemics in China

Abstract

Objective: Develop and psychometrically test the physiopsychological disorders scale for medical rescuers fighting epidemics (PDS-MRFE).

Method: A three-phase approach was used to develop and test the physiopsychological disorders scale: (1) creating the item pool, (2) preliminarily evaluating items, and (3) refining the scale and estimating the psychometric properties. The items of the instrument were generated based on a comprehensive literature review and a qualitative study conducted with 31 medical rescuers (18 nurses and 13 doctors) fighting epidemics. A preliminary evaluation of items was conducted using content validity which was evaluated by a panel of 15 experts. Validity and reliability examinations were conducted to refine the scale and evaluate its psychometric properties. This was done using two different samples. Specifically, Sample A (360 medical rescuers) was employed for item reduction and exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and Sample B (287 medical rescuers) was employed for the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and determination of other psychometric properties (i.e., reliability, concurrent, convergent, and discriminant validity), which further confirmed the structure of the scale and evaluated its final psychometric properties.

Results: The final scale has 39 items with three subscales, including before, during, and after rescue. The exploratory factor analysis result indicated that the before-rescue scale of four items, during-rescue of 21 items, and after-rescue of 14 items explained 52.07%, 69.75%, and 52.30% of the cumulative variance, respectively. The confirmatory factor analysis result indicated that model fit indices of three subscales were acceptable and showed evidence of adequate content, convergent, discriminate, and concurrent validity. The Cronbach's α coefficients for each subscale and all dimensions ranged from 0.81 to 0.92, indicating good reliability for the PDS-MRFE.

Conclusions: The physiopsychological disorders scale is a psychometrically valid and reliable instrument and can be used in both clinical practice and research to evaluate different physiopsychological disorders at different medical rescue stages among medical rescuers fighting epidemics.

Keywords: epidemic; instrument development; medical rescuers; physiopsychological disorders; psychometric testing.