Cross-cultural Adaptation and Validation of Professional Scale in Iranian Nurses

Abstract

Introduction: Professionalism is a fundamental concept in nursing. Today’s society needs nurses who are able to accept and fulfill their professional roles. Specially, nurses of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) are one of the most sensitive parts of the hospital and their behaviour is very important. In order to measure their caring professionalism and the leveling of this process, there are instruments used in Iranian culture. Aim: This study was aimed to cross-culturally adapt and validate the Hall’s Professionalism Scale (HPS) in clinical setting for Iranian nurses of ICU. Materials and Methods: Methodological study was carried out with 300 nurses of ICU in Iran. The criteria for selection of the participants was limited to the nurses who worked full time in ICU of the mentioned hospitals, were available and interested to respond to data collection instrument. The crosscultural adaptation of the Professionalism Scale was performed according to international standards, and its validation was carried out to be used in the Iran context by means of factor analysis and Cronbach’s alpha as a measure of internal consistency. Results: All nurses who participated in the study worked in ICU with average working experience of 6.77±5.99 years and their mean age was 34.03±10.3 years. The results of the factor analysis revealed six factors including factor 1 (the scope of the Professional Association as reference) with a specific amount of 14.04, factor 2 (believing in the continuing competency) with a specific amount of 14.42, factor 3 (believing in self-regulation) 16.06, factor 4 (sense of commitment to the profession) has a special amount of 11.56, factor 5 (independence) with a special amount of 16.81, and factor 6 (believing in serving society) with a specific amount of 14.02. The correlation coefficient of Cronbach’s alpha was used to determine the internal correlation of the instrument, which was 0.89 for all items. Conclusion: This study showed that the translated version of the “Nursing Professionalism Scale” is a useful instrument for helping nurses and nursing authorities to understand the concept of professionalism and its impact on improving the clinical status of nurses, patients and organisations, and even clinical education of nursing students.

Keywords

• instrument
• nursing
• professionalism
• translation