Evaluation of the psychometric properties of the nursing students’ attitudes toward mental health nursing and consumers instrument

Abstract

The present study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the instrument “Nursing Students’ Attitudes Toward Mental Health Nursing and Consumers” for use among Nursing students in Brazil. The subjects were 91.3% female and 8.7% male and their ages ranged from 18 to 58 years, with a mean (M) of 21.9 years and a standard deviation (sd) of 3.88 years. The study included students from the undergraduate course in Nursing of five higher public education institutions, with a total of 393 students. Of these, 365 answered the questionnaires at their two application times, resulting in 92.87% full participation in the study. Regarding the school year, 23.9% were from 2013 and 76.1% from 2014. The data were entered into the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) program, v.21, to be analyzed by descriptive exploratory analysis, correlations analysis, means comparison and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with the exploratory factor analysis technique and oblique rotation. Convergent validity was used as the form of validation, using the Authoritarianism and Minority View dimensions of the Opinions about Mental Illness (OMI) Scale. After generating the structure of the instrument to be tested, the Confirmatory Factor Analysis technique (CFA) was used, through the Structural Equation Modeling technique (SEM), with AMOS/SPSS, v.22, to identify and specify the model, through Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation. The fit was given by the X2 model, and the absolute, incremental and parsimonious fit indices.