Designing and Validating the Nursing Advocacy Scale

Patient advocacy concept is a very important issue، because if the me-aning of advocacy in nursing profession is not clear، nurses will not properly prepare to perform one of their basic roles. Sear-ching the literature shows that there is not a useful tool to evaluate the advocacy role of nurses in Iran. Therefore this study was conducted for designing and validating the nursing advocacy scale in Iran. This study was a methodological research. Initially، instr-ument items were designed through a comprehensive overview of present quail-tative and quantitative studies and used tools in the field of nursing advocacy conc-ept in the word. Then، validity of the tool was obtained through face، content and constructs validity and its reliability was obtained via internal consistency and test-retest. Content validity index of Waltz and Bausell for all instruments of nursing advocacy scale was 93. 72. In order to det-ermine face validity of nursing advocacy scale، we tried to use writing، structuring and a seeming logical and interesting for the tool. By using exploratory factor ana-lysis، principal components method and orthogonal Varimax rotation، the factor structure of the nursing advocacy scale instrument was documented in five dime-nsions. Cronbach''s alpha coefficient for nursing advocacy was 0. 920 and test-retest reliability coefficient was 0. 916. Discussion & At the end of the study، «nursing advocacy scale» which co-ntained 57 items، and was composed of five dimensions were designed and prep-ared. These aspects included A) Necessity of nursing advocacy with 12 items، B) Nature of nursing advocacy with 16 items، C) Facilitating factors of nursing advocacy with 10 items، D) Inhibiting factors of nursing advocacy with 13 items and E) and results of nursing advocacy with 6 items.