Adaptation and Testing of the Developmental Disability Attitudes in Nursing Care Instrument

Abstract

Background and PurposeIndividuals with developmental disability (DD) often experience poor health outcomes, potentiated by healthcare inequities. Nurses have the potential to reduce these inequities through the quality of care provided. The quality of care provided by nursing students, the future generation of nurses, is affected by the attitudes of their clinical nursing faculty. The purpose of this study was to adapt and test an instrument to specifically measure the attitudes of clinical nursing faculty toward providing care to people with DD.MethodsThe Disability Attitudes in Health Care (DAHC) instrument was adapted to create the new Developmental Disability Attitudes in Nursing Care (DDANC) instrument.ResultsContent experts reviewed the DDANC for content validity (CVI = 0.88), followed by testing for internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.7). The study respondents had overall positive attitudes toward the care of people with DD.ConclusionsThe DDANC is an acceptably valid and reliable instrument to assess attitudes of clinical nursing faculty toward providing care to people with DD.