Development of Professionalism Assessment Scale for Nurse Educator

Nursing profession began with a genuine desire to serve and care for others, combined with a sense of compassion and commitment. Nurse Educator play a vital role in the health care system globally. The professionalism and performance of Nurse Educators, link closely to the productivity and quality of services they provide. It is important to identify factors influencing professionalism of Nurse Educators if the quality of education in the organizations to be improved. A non experimental methodological study was carried out to develop professionalism assessment scale for Nurse Educator. The conceptual framework used to guide this study was Healthy Work Environments for Nurses - Components, Factors and Outcomes developed by Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario in 2007. Scale was prepared under five stages i;e conceptualization and item generation, preliminary evaluation, administration to development sample, analysis of scale development data and scale refinement and validation. Psychometric qualities of the scale such as validity (content, convergent, divergent and know group) and reliability (internal consistency and stability) was determined at preliminary level. After preliminary evaluation, scale was introduced to 30 Nurse Educators of various nursing institutions using judgmental sampling technique. SPSS was used for statistical analysis. Factor analysis approach was used to determine construct validity of the scale. Principal component analysis (extraction method) was used to determine total variance of scale items which resulted into extraction of nine components (domains of professionalism) of scale based on Eigen value =1. Further Varimax with Kaiser Normalization (Rotation Method) was performed to determine scale items correlation and all 34 scale's items were positively correlated and retained in the scale (Based on factor loading of 0.4). Reliability (internal consistency) of scale was determined. Cronbach's Alpha is used to determine internal consistency (p=.926) where as test retest method was used to determine scale's stability (p=.89) and scale found to be reliable. Domain wise correlation were also calculated which indicates high internal consistency among all nine domains of scale. Finally scale user's norms were established.