Validation of a Scale to Measure Self-Efficacy in Interprofessional Collaborative Practice Among Health Care Sciences Students

The need for valid tools to evaluate interprofessional education (IPE) efforts is growing because many agencies accrediting occupational therapy education programs now mandate IPE (Hasnain et al., 2017). The first aim of this study was to create a new tool, based on the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC; 2011, 2016) competencies, reflecting a unidimensional scale of self-efficacy in interprofessional competence (IPC). The second study aim, dependent on the accomplishment of the first, was to create a short version of the tool that retained the ability to separate students into distinct levels of perceived IPC.

DESIGN: A cross-sectional study was undertaken involving 1,350 students from an entry-level occupational therapy program and 10 other health professions programs participating in a university-wide IPE event.

METHOD: Before the event, students completed a validated survey assessing self-efficacy in IPC using Qualtrics (Provo, UT) and a visual analog response scale (0–100). A two-faceted Rasch model was applied to investigate rating scale functioning, item fit, unidimensionality, and separation. A subsequent iterative process considering qualitative as well as psychometric considerations was used to create a short version of the tool.

RESULTS: Findings supported a unidimensional scale including 29 items (out of the original 38) that fit the Rasch model. The 29-item scale demonstrated an acceptable level of unidimensionality and was able to separate students into at least four distinct strata of self-efficacy in IPC. Efforts to create a short tool yielded a nine-item scale with an acceptable separation capability.

CONCLUSION: Findings confirm empirically that the IPEC competencies reflect a shared underlying construct and support validity of the two versions of a tool to measure self-efficacy in IPC.

IMPACT STATEMENT: Our study provides two new tools that offer much-needed mechanisms to validly measure IPE outcomes among entry-level students of occupational therapy as well as other health care professions.

References

Hasnain, M., Gruss, V., Keehn, M., Peterson, E., Valenta, A., & Kottorp, A. (2017). Development and validation of a tool to assess self-efficacy for competence in interprofessional collaborative practice. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 31, 255–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2016.1249789

Interprofessional Education Collaborative. (2011). Core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice: Report of an expert panel. Washington, DC: Author.

Interprofessional Education Collaborative. (2016). Core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice: 2016 update. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from https://hsc.unm.edu/ipe/resources/ipec-2016-core-competencies.pdf