Psychometric properties of End‐of‐Life Caregiving Experience Appraisal Scale: Iranian critical care nurses

Abstract

Health care providers should be able to provide good quality end-of-life care. A tool to evaluate the positive and negative consequences of caring for dying patients is warranted. The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Persian version of the End-of-Life Caregiving Experience Appraisal Scale (EOLCAS). This research was conducted in two phases. Phase I: The World Health Organization Protocol of forward-backward translation and an expert panel in order to determine face and content validity. Phase II: Survey development with 310 nurses who worked in critical care units, construct validity (construct, convergent and divergent validity), internal consistency (average inter-item correlation, Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega) and construct reliability were evaluated. The exploratory factor analysis showed that the present scale (Persian version) has four factors: Negative physical-emotional and social consequences, transcendental communication, information deficits and future rumination, which explained 83.92% of the overall extracted variance. Convergent and divergent validity were confirmed for all factors. The internal consistency and construct reliability were acceptable. The scale has a multidimensional concept that is sufficiently reliable and the use of the scale would be helpful in measuring consequences of caring for dying patients. This scale makes a significant contribution in that it helps in the recognition of positive and negative consequences of critical care nurses' caring for dying patients.