Abstract
Background: For decades, enhancing staff nurse decisional involvement in matters of nursing practice and patient care has been identified as a long-term strategy to improve the quality of the nursing work environment and the safety and quality of patient care.
Objective: To describe psychometric assessments of the Decisional Involvement Scale (DIS), a diagnostic and evaluative measure of nurse decisional involvement.
Methods: A series of assessments were conducted to evaluate the psychometric performance of the scale. Content validity was assessed by experts in the field. Descriptive statistics were used to examine the use and performance of the scale. The contrasted groups approach was used to assess construct validity. Item analysis was used to explore evidence of the internal consistency of items and subscales across multiple samples. Structural modeling was used to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis using data from two independent samples of staff registered nurses (RNs; n = 849 and 650).
Results: Acceptable content validity indexes (CVIs) were independently generated by three content experts. Construct validity was supported, as hypothesized; nurses working on professional practice units scored significantly higher for all items when compared to nurses working on units without professional practice models in place. Internal consistency (coefficient alpha) was high and nearly identical for the total measure and all subscales across the two independent nurse samples. Six subscales were identified using factor analysis, and these were confirmed by structural modeling.
Conclusion: Psychometric findings support that the DIS is a valid and reliable measure of staff nurse decisional involvement.