Psychometric evaluation of the Australian interprofessional socialisation and valuing scale: An invariant measure for health practitioners and students

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Australian Interprofessional Socialisation and Valuing Scale (ISVS)-21 and provide an invariant measure for health practitioners and students to assess interprofessional socialisation. Methods: The COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) were used as guidelines. This research began with a key step: conducting a pilot study to assess content validity, a requirement of COSMIN for item development. The ISVS-21 has not yet been validated in Australia. Content validity checks ensure the developed items accurately represent the measured construct in the intended cultural context. In addition to conducting more comprehensive tests of psychometric properties compared to previous studies on ISVS-21, this paper introduces something new by evaluating the internal structure of the instrument involving measurement invariance and hypothesis testing for construct validity based on several assumptions related to interprofessional socialisation and values. An invariant measure validates the use of the Australian ISVS-21 on practitioner and student equivalently, allowing the comparison of outcomes at both levels. Results: The evaluation of content validity indicated that the items were relevant, comprehensible (practitioners and students had an agreement score of >70% for all 21 items), and comprehensive to the concepts intended to be measured. Structural validity confirms ISVS-21 Australia as unidimensional, with good internal consistency reliabilities, Cronbach’s α scores = 0.96 (practitioner) and 0.96 (student). Measurement invariance tests confirm ISVS-21 Australia is configural, metric and scalar invariance (ΔCFI ≤ 0.01) across the tested groups of practitioner and student, and therefore suitable for use by both cohorts in Australia. Age and length of work/study were discriminant factors for interprofessional socialisation in both cohorts; the professional background was a differentiating factor for practitioners but not for students. Hypotheses testing results support the COSMIN construct validity requirement for the measure, with 83.3% of assumptions tested accepted. Conclusion: The Australian ISVS has good psychometric properties based on evaluating the content validity, internal structure, and hypotheses testing for construct validity. In addition, Australian ISVS is an invariant measure for use by health practitioners and students and, therefore, confirmed as a quality measure to assess interprofessional socialisation for both cohorts in Australia.