A brief homophobia scale in medical students from two universities: Results of a refinement process

Abstract Background The process of evaluating measurement scales is an ongoing procedure that requires revisions and adaptations according to the characteristics of the participants. The Homophobia Scale of seven items (EHF-7) has showed acceptable performance in medical students attending to two universities in Colombia. However, performance of some items was poor and could be removed, with an improvement in the psychometric findings of items retained. Objective To review the psychometric functioning and refine the content of EHF-7 among medical students from two Colombian universities. Methods A group of 667 students from the first to tenth semester participated in the research. Theirs ages were between 18 and 34 (mean, 20.9 ± 2.7) years-old, and 60.6% were females. Cronbach alpha ( α ) and omega of McDonald ( Ω ) were calculated as indicators of reliability and to refine the scale, an exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed. Results EHF-7 showed α  = .793 and Ω  = .796 and a main factor that explained 45.2% of the total variance. EFA and CFA suggested the suppression of three items. The four-item version (EHF-4) reached an α  = .770 and Ω  = .775, with a single factor that accounted for 59.7% of the total variance. CFA showed better indexes ( χ 2  = 3.622; df  = 1; p  = 0.057; Root-mean-square error of approximation (RMSEA) = .063, 90% CI , .000–.130; Comparative Fit Indices (CFI) = .998; Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .991). Conclusions EHF-4 shows high internal consistency and a single dimension that explains more than 50% of the total variance. Further studies are needed to confirm these observations, that can be taken as preliminary.