A New Scale of Readiness for Health Care Students to Encounter Partner Abuse

Abstract

Partner abuse (PA) is associated with significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. Health care practitioners regularly encounter patients experiencing PA and require comprehensive education on how to respond. This study describes the creation and validation of a new measure of readiness to encounter patients experiencing PA for health care practitioners and students. Initial item development and content validation were informed by expert feedback. Psychometric properties were assessed using data collected from Australian health care students, using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Internal consistency, inter-scale correlations, and test–retest analysis were performed. An initial pool of 67 items was reduced to 48 following content validation by 5 experts as a measure of construct validity. A total of n = 926 responses were collected, which were randomly split into two groups to perform a PCA and CFA. The PCA resulted in a 31-item version, which was further reduced to a 27-item version following the CFA, containing four factors. Internal consistency and test–retest analyses demonstrated good reliability. The produced scale is a 27-item measure of readiness to encounter patients experiencing PA, which has demonstrated good psychometric properties with a sample of Australian health care students. Results indicate that self-efficacy and Emotional-readiness are a large component of readiness. The scale may be used to measure the readiness of a cohort, or as a pre and post-intervention measure, and results may provide insight into the educational needs of a cohort.

Psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the Readiness to Encounter Partner Abuse Patients Scale

“…The READI Scale was created by Sawyer et al (2020) to evaluate the readiness of health students and health workers to encounter patients who experience partner abuse. It is a 7‐point Likert scale composed of 27 items: one corresponds to completely disagree, four neutral and seven completely agree.…”

“…Cronbach's alpha for the scale was reported to be .92. (Sawyer et al, 2020). Originally, the language of the READI Scale was English.…”

“…Permission was requested from one of the authors who created the READI Scale (Sawyer et al, 2020) through email to adapt it to Turkish culture and to evaluate its validity and reliability. Ethical approval was obtained from the ethical committee of the foundation university where the study was conducted (Reference Number:141).…”

“…To meet this need, The Readiness to Encounter Partner Abuse Patients (READI) Scale was developed by Sawyer et al (2020).…”

“…Sawyer et al's study, including health students, showed that the scale had a high internal consistency (Cronbach alpha: .92) and suggested that it should be utilized by healthcare professionals and health students (Sawyer et al, 2020).…”