Design, Development & Validation of an Assessment Tool for Undergraduate Medical Students of Community Health Sciences Rotation

Abstract

Background: Questionnaires are the most commonly used data collection methods in applied research for assessment of inputs. It is a useful instrument if valid and reliable. Objectives; To establish, design and appraise the reliability and validity tool for measuring knowledge with skills among undergraduate students. Methods: An observational study conducted at Peshawar Medical College in six months’ duration through three stage process, after having approval of Institutional Review Board of Prime Foundation. Process initiated by slot regulation, component development and questionnaire generation with judgement analysis of instrument by an expert panel of five public health specialists for relevance, representativeness and transparency of each item based on Likert rating scale. Validity and reliability measured in the final steps. Suggestions put forward by the experts with item impact scores corresponded to face validity. Rewording, combination and elimination resulted in final 35 item instrument.Data was analysed through SPSS Version- 21 with computation of content validity ratio, content validity index, item content validity, scale validity, Kappa statistics and Cronbach’s Alpha values. Results: Mean years of experience for the panellists was 14.2 years with S. D + 5.2 (n= 5). Excellent CVR, I CVI, S CVI, Percent Agreement and Kappa statistics were calculated for the entire questionnaire as 1.The final 24 item knowledgesection had 0.732 Inter Class Correlation and acceptable Cronbach Alphaas 0.743, while the 11 item skill portion had 0.819 Inter Class Correlation with good Cronbach Alpha 0.890. Conclusions: The findings support the face and content validity of the questionnaire. Keywords: Instrument development and Validation, Competency, Knowledge, Skill, Assessment, Content Validity, Content Validity Ratio, Reliability, Questionnaire