A latent trait approach to measuring HIV/AIDS related stigma in healthcare professionals: application of mokken scaling technique

BMC Medical Education

Research Article

Mohamed Azmi Ahmad Hassali¹  Daniel D. Reidpath²  Pascale Allotey²  Keivan Ahmadi³ 

[1] Discipline of Social and Administrative Pharmacy, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800, Penang, Malaysia;Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Sunway Campus, Jalan Lagoon Selatan, 46150, Bandar Sunway, Selangor DE, Malaysia;School of Pharmacy, University of Lincoln, Joseph Banks Laboratories, LN6 7DL, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom;

关键词: HIV/AIDS;    Attitude;    Stigma;    Mokken scale analysis;    Scale;    Measurement;    Healthcare professionals;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12909-016-0676-3

 received in 2015-02-18, accepted in 2016-05-24,  发布年份 2016

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe attitudes of healthcare professionals towards HIV positive patients and high risk groups are central to the quality of care and therefore to the management of HIV/AIDS related stigma in health settings. Extant HIV/AIDS stigma scales that measure stigmatising attitudes towards people living with HIV/AIDS have been developed using scaling techniques such as principal component analysis. This approach has resulted in instruments that are often long. Mokken scale analysis is a nonparametric hierarchical scaling technique that can be used to develop unidimensional cumulative scales. This technique is advantageous over the other approaches; as the scales are usually shorter, while retaining acceptable psychometric properties. Moreover, Mokken scales also make no distributional assumptions about the underlying data, other than that the data are capable of being ordered by item and by person. In this study we aimed at developing a precise and concise measure of HIV/AIDS related stigma among health care professionals, using Mokken scale analysis.MethodsWe carried out a cross sectional survey of healthcare students at the Monash University campuses in Malaysia and Australia. The survey consisted of demographic questions and an initial item pool of twenty five potential questions for inclusion in an HIV stigma scale.ResultsWe analysed the data using the mokken package in the R statistical environment providing a 9-item scale with high reliability, validity and acceptable psychometric properties, measuring and ranking the HIV/AIDS related stigmatising attitudes.ConclusionMokken scaling procedure not only produced a comprehensive hierarchical scale that could accurately order a person along HIV/AIDS stigmatising attitude, but also demonstrated a unidimensional and reliable measurement tool which could be used in future studies. The principal component analysis confirmed the accuracy of the Mokken scale analysis in correctly detecting the unidimensionality of this scale. We recommend future works to study the generalisability of this scale in a new population.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Ahmadi et al. 2016