The heat wave knowledge, awareness, practice and behavior scale: Scale development, validation and reliability

Abstract

Heat waves are extreme weather and climate events that threaten public health by increasing morbidity and mortality. To reduce the health effects of heat waves, it is necessary to increase the knowledge level of the public, conduct awareness and protection activities and monitor these activity outcomes. The present study aimed to develop and validate a Turkish language scale of heat wave knowledge, awareness, practice and behavior for Turkish nationality. After item generation and creating dimensions, content validity analysis was performed. To evaluate the validity and reliability of the knowledge construct, the difficulty index, discriminant index and Kuder Richardson 20 (KR20) were used. The validity and reliability of the awareness, practice and behavior constructs were evaluated with exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and Cronbach’s alpha was used. The 15 items had a good difficulty, discrimination index and KR20 in the knowledge construct. The 14 items were yielded in EFA; 13 items were retained in CFA, and Cronbach’s alpha values of 0.878, 0.768, 0.855, and 0.858 were obtained for total items, practice, awareness and behavior, respectively. Eventually, a Turkish language scale was developed that is reliable and valid for assessing heat wave knowledge, awareness, practice and behavior.