Designing and Validating a Search Questionnaire for Searching in Online Information Resources Based on Clinical Questions Among Iranian Medical Students

To be up-to-date, the medical community must have the ability to communicate in the electronic environment and search for information resources. The present study aims to develop a questionnaire to assess the attitudes of Iranian medical students towards searching for information resources by formulating clinical questions and evaluate its validly and reliability.

This is a descriptive cross-sectional study. Participants were 190 interns from two educational hospitals in Tehran, Iran who were randomly selected. Exploratory factor analysis was used for assessing construct validity of the questionnaire in SPSS software, version 22.

The face validity and content validity of the 18-item questionnaire were assessed and confirmed by five experts. Based on the results of exploratory factor analysis, four factors of self-learning, learning motivation, information proficiency, and analysis were identified. The results of confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the four-factor model. The total reliability and the reliability for all factors were calculated using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient which were reported above 60%. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin coefficient and Bartlett test coefficient were 0.822 and 0.934, respectively (P=0.000).

The questionnaire has acceptable validity and reliability to be used by medical community in Iran and in future studies.