Cognition and attitude of Chinese people toward postdisaster psychological crisis intervention: Scale development and validation

Abstract

Our aim was to develop a scale to measure the cognition and attitude of Chinese people toward postdisaster psychological crisis intervention and to evaluate the psychometric properties of the measure. The study was divided into three stages: (a) Designing the scale items; (b) administering the pilot measure and performing psychometric analysis; (c) implementing administration of the final version of the measure, and performing confirmatory factor analysis with 1,195 participants residing in the Shandong and Sichuan Provinces in China. The Cognition scale contains 15 items in 3 subscales we labeled as theoretical cognition, professional cognition, and objective cognition. The Attitude scale contains 17 items in 3 subscales of obligatory attitude, constructive attitude, and positive attitude. Both scales exhibited adequate validity and internal consistency reliability. The Chinese People's Cognition and Attitude Toward Postdisaster Psychological Crisis Intervention Scale is reliable and valid and can be used by postdisaster aid providers and researchers to assess the cognition and attitude of Chinese people who have experienced a disaster.