Pregnancy in adolescence: design and validation of an instrument for measuring intersectoral work

Abstract

Even though intersectoral work in health promotion is widely recognized, the literature consulted showed an absence of valid and reliable instruments in this area. Objective: to design and validate an instrument to measure intersectoral work in public officials who participated in a National Strategy for the Prevention of Pregnancy in Adolescence (EPEA in Spanish). Materials and methods: 1. Design of the instrument based on a literature review, history of intersectoral work in Colombia and experience of the research team; 2. Facial validation to measure precision, relevance, clarity and understanding of the items with a convenience sample of 12 people; 3. Validation of the construct using the Rasch model, on a sample of 132 public officials. Results: The final instrument, made up of 21 Items, presented good facial and construct validity properties. The internal consistency was 0.92. In the Rasch analysis, people and items that did not fit the model were excluded, achieving positive correlations between items and linearity measures greater than 0.47 with a variance explained by the measures of 44.6%. The variance explained in the first contrast of the residuals was 5.7%, the separation of people was 2.07 and of items was 4.51 and the difficulty of the items was between-3.14 and 3.69 logits. None of the items presented differential functioning. Conclusions: there is a valid and reliable instrument with 21 items, for the evaluation of competencies in intersectoral work of public officials who work in prevention of pregnancy in adolescence.