Development and preliminary validation of the physician support of skin self-examination scale

Abstract

Skin self-examination (SSE) is a crucial preventive health behaviour in melanoma survivors, as it facilitates early detection. Physician endorsement of SSE is important for the initiation and maintenance of this behaviour. This study focussed on the preliminary validation of a new nine-item measure assessing physician support of SSE in melanoma patients. English and French versions of this measure were administered to 188 patients diagnosed with melanoma in the context of a longitudinal study investigating predictors and facilitators of SSE. Structural validity was investigated using exploratory factor analysis conducted in Mplus and convergent and divergent validity was assessed using bivariate correlations conducted in spss. Results suggest that the scale is a unidimensional and reliable measure of physician support for SSE. Given the uncertainty regarding the optimal frequency of SSE for at-risk individuals, we recommend that future psychometric evaluations of this scale consider tailoring items according to the most up-to-date research on SSE effectiveness.

Validation of the English and French versions of the Brief Health Care Climate Questionnaire

“…Time since diagnosis and cancer stage were additionally collected from patients’ medical files and hospital tumour registries. The Physician Support of Skin Self-Examination Scale assessed the patients’ perspective of their doctors’ encouragement of skin self-examination (SSE) ( Coroiu et al, 2017 ). Patients’ self-efficacy for SSE was assessed using Skin Self-Examination Self-Efficacy Scale ( Bergeron et al, 2017 ).…”

Prevalence and correlates of skin self-examination behaviors among melanoma survivors: a systematic review

“…Specifically, relationship satisfaction and quality, support of SSE by partners, partner motivation, and partner attendance at medical visits were positively associated with patients' self-efficacy to do SSE [27,30]. Physician support of SSE was associated with the intention to perform SSE [22,23]. Additionally, patients reported that routine education on how to do SSE helped them to identify thinner second primary melanomas [43].…”

“…Twenty-five studies were conducted in the USA and five studies were carried out in Canada. Around one third of the studies were cross-sectional surveys (n = 12), nine of them were randomized controlled trials (RCTs), seven of them used a prospective research design, and the rest were qualitative using focus groups, (n = 1) [36] or analyzed secondary data (n = 1) [23].…”

“…Less than half of the studies used a health behavior theory or a behavior change technique as part of their framework for their research (n = 11 [18,20,22,25,27,29,32,34,35,[38][39][40]. Nineteen studies did not use or explicitly describe any theoretical framework in their research [8,9,16,17,19,21,23,24,26,28,30,31,33,36,37,[41][42][43].…”

“…Due to the use of self-reports in the studies, recall and social desirability biases in addition to differential bias (i.e., patients with good prognosis might remember their SSE practices differently compared to those with serious and deadly melanomas) might have occurred. Three survey studies did not report clear inclusion/exclusion criteria for participants [16,23,31,33]. Only a few studies adjusted for covariates or controlled for confounding in their statistical models [8,20,27,34,35].…”