The establishment and the reliability and validity test of the scale of ICU staff's beliefs and attitudes on patients early mobility

Objective To develop an instrument for measuring ICU staff′s beliefs and attitudes towards patients′ early mobility and to establish the psychometric characteristics of this scale. Methods Based on the ICU medical personnel questionnaire developed by Jolley and a large number of related literature, the item pool was formulated. Preliminary draft was formed through expert consultation and a small sample pre-test. Totally 336 ICU staff were surveyed for investigation to test the validity and reliability. Results ICU staff's beliefs and attitudes of patients′ early mobility scale consisted of 38 items; there were 34 belief scales and 4 attitude scales, the exploratory factor analysis identified five principal factors and explained for 60.50% variance. The item content validity index ranged from 0.667 to 1.000, the scale content validity index was 0.911. The Cronbach α coefficient of the beliefs scale was 0.927 and the attitudes scale was 0.822. The Cronbach α coefficient of each dimension of the beliefs scale was 0.616-0.906. Conclusions The self-designed ICU staff's beliefs and attitudes of patients′ early mobility scale has good validity, reliability and applicability to ICU staff. Key words: Intensive care units; Beliefs; Attitudes; Validity; Reliability