Development and Validation of an Observation Scale for Assessing Humanistic Patient Care: A Preliminary Study

• In Event: Measuring the Noncognitive Traits of Students in the Professions

Abstract

This study developed and examined a brief instrument designed to assess medical students’ performance in humanistic patient care. The instrument included five subscales assessing Integrity, Compassion, Altruism, Respect, and Empathy (ICARE). Fifty Class of 2010 students’ videotaped performances in an OSCE station were rated by three investigators. The Cronbach’s alpha, intraclass correlation, and the generalizability (G) study were conducted for reliability examination. To examine validity, a factor analysis was conducted to explore the latent structure of the scale and the correlations of the scale scores with four external criterion measures were calculated. Psychometric findings provided support for internal consistency, inter-rater and reproducibility reliability as well as construct validity of the scale scores. The criterion-related validity remains to be further investigated.

Authors

• Ming Lee, University of California - Los Angeles

• Paul F. Wimmers, University of California - Los Angeles

• Cha-Chi Fung, University of California - Los Angeles