Development and Psychometric Testing of a Humanistic Caring Scale for Medical and Nursing Students

Abstract

Background Medicine and nursing are not only empirical sciences but also a type of artistry with humanistic quality. Therefore, humanistic education of medical and nursing students in medical schools is internationally emphasized, with an aim to nurture students to expand their medical work beyond physical examination of patients to taking care of them at the psychological and social levels, and become “good doctors” with humanistic quality. The purpose of this study is to develop an appropriate assessment tool for measuring the humanistic caring competence of medical and nursing students and test its psychometric properties. Methods Questions were first designed based on focus group interviews and the Delphi method. After that, 38 questions were drafted using a Likert five-point scale. In the psychometric testing, the participants include medical students undergoing clinical training, nursing students who had started clinical practice before graduating from the school, and those participating in the two-year postgraduate training program for nurses. The obtained data were then analyzed with SPSS 22.0 and Mplus. Results In the pilot test, the sample included 155 medical and nursing students. After the exploratory factor analysis, 19 items and 4 factors were obtained, namely “self-awareness,” “patient-caring,” “being attentive to medical information,” and “social-environmental caring,” and the total explained variance is 74.03%. In the formal test, 331 medical students were included in the sample to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis. The internal consistency of each subscale is between 0.74 to 0.88, while that of the whole scale is 0.93; the model fit indices, convergent and discriminant vadility are also up to the standard. This result confirms that the scale has a good psychometric properties in terms of the reliability and validity. In the comparison of background variables, students with different gender, ages, religious beliefs, medical service experiences, and volunteer service experiences have different performances in different dimensions of humanistic caring. Conclusions This scale demonstrates good to excellent model fit indices, reliability and validity and can be used as an assessment tool for measuring the effectiveness of humanistic education for medical and nursing students.