Developing a scale to measure synergy in health promotion partnerships

Abstract

Synergy is the degree to which a partnership combines the assets of all the partners in the search for better solutions and is generally regarded as the product of a partnership including vertical integration, shared know-how and shared resources. There has been very little research on the determinants and measurement of synergy in health promotion partnerships. This study was designed to describe how synergy is conceptualized in health promotion partnerships and to develop a synergy measurement tool. Five focus groups were organized with 36 health promotion partners in order to explore how synergy is conceptualized in their partnerships. Participants represented health, community, education, arts, sports and youth sectors. Focus groups were recorded and transcribed verbatim. A content analysis was carried out on the transcripts using counting and data reduction techniques. An item pool was generated from these findings and an eight-item five-point scale was developed called the Jones synergy scale. This scale was incorporated into an overall questionnaire on partnership functioning which was posted to 469 partners in 40 health promotion partnerships. A response rate of 72% was achieved for the postal survey (n = 337). The Jones synergy scale was subjected to reliability and validity tests. Cronbach's alpha was 0.91. Corrected item-total correlations ranged from 0.6 to 0.7 with a Cronbach's alpha if item deleted of 0.9 for all items. Principal components analysis (PCA) was the chosen factor analysis method. One component was extracted explaining 62% of the variance. Coefficients ranged from 0.83 to 0.70 with an initial eigenvalue of 4.94. The scale was subjected to item-convergent, item-discriminant and concurrent validity tests. All items correlated more strongly with their own scale than with any other scales used in the questionnaire. The Jones synergy scale was highly correlated (0.73, P < 0.01) with an existing synergy scale.