Assessing attitudes towards biostatistics education among medical students: Adaptation and preliminary evaluation of the Chinese version survey of attitudes towards statistics (SATS-36)

Abstract

Background Despite the advantages of mastering biostatistics, medical students generally perceive biostatistics as a difficult and challenging subject and even experience anxiety during the courses. Evidence for the relationships between achievements and students' attitudes have been proven that attitudes implying cognitive competence at the beginning of the biostatistics course, could affect attitudes at the end of the course that, in turn, influenced student performance. However, there are disagreements in the results of measuring attitudes. Thus, we need acknowledged standard instruments to assess them. This study was conducted to develop a Chinese version of the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS-36) in order to acquire a valid instrument to measure attitudes toward biostatistics under Chinese medical educational background. Methods The Chinese version SATS-36 was developed by translation and back-translation of the original scale, followed by revision according to expert advice on the most appropriate item content. The local adaption was performed on a cohort of 1709 Chinese-speaking medical undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in biostatistics courses. And then, the reliability, validity and discrimination of the questionnaires were evaluated through correlation coefficient calculation, factor analysis, parallel analysis and other methods. Results The Chinese version SATS-36 consisted of 36 items and loaded a five-factor structure by factor analysis, which offered an alternative similar but not equal to that original six-factor structure. The cumulative variance contribution rate was 62.20%, the Cronbach's α coefficient was 0.908, the Guttman split-half reliability coefficient was 0.905 and the test–retest reliability coefficient was 0.752. Discriminant analysis revealed small to large significant differences in the five attitude subscales. Conclusions The Chinese version SATS-36 with good validity and reliability in this study can be used to evaluate the learning framework of Chinese medical students.