Development of the Nurses' Willingness to Engage in Palliative Care Scale

Abstract

Nurses play an important role in palliative care, and their willingness to engage in such work is thus crucial. The purpose of this study was to develop, and test the reliability and validity of, the Nurses' Willingness to Engage in Palliative Care Scale. The sample consisted of 224 Chinese nurses with a mean age of 32.36 (SD, 5.986) years. The critical ratio method was used for item analysis. Reliability was assessed by calculating Cronbach -. Content validity was assessed by calculating a content validity index based on ratings from 5 nursing experts. Structural validity was calculated by exploratory factor analysis. The developed scale consists of 20 items over 4 dimensions (attitude toward the behavior, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and behavioral intention) and has high content validity (0.97). The reliability of the scale was found to be sufficient (Cronbach - =.896). Four common factors were extracted from exploratory factor analysis, and the cumulative variance explained was 68.938%. The Nurses' Willingness to Engage in Palliative Care Scale has good reliability and validity and can be used to assess nurses' willingness to work in palliative care units.