Design and psychometrics of Spiritual Health Services Competency Questionnaire

Deepening society's spirituality needs holistic care, qualified and safe spiritual health services, competency-based education, and evaluation of employee competency. Failure to determine "competencies" and lack of a questionnaire hinders evaluating the a questionnaire hinder evaluating the quality of spiritual health. The aim of the study was to design a psychometrically assessment of the Spiritual Health Services Competence Scale based on the Sound Heart Model.

In the sequential exploratory study, during the combined study of the tool construction, with the hybrid model of Schwartz and Kim, in three stages of theoretical review of pieces of evidence, fieldwork (in-depth individual interviews/focus group discussion), data analysis (the conventional content analysis method), the initial version of the 80-item questionnaire was developed. The validity of the questionnaire was checked with face validity (qualitative: by 10 experts, quantitative: by evaluating the effect of the item), content validity (quantitative: CVR with Lavache's formula, by 14 experts, qualitative: CVI by Walters method and Bassel), construct validity (by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis), reliability with internal consistency and Cronbach's alpha calculation by using SPSS-22, the Liser software. In this way, the questionnaire was administered to 371 healthcare workers.

The CVR score for 40 items was greater than Lawshe’s number (0.571(. All items had CVI scores higher than 0.79. Exploratory factor analysis showed the 6-factor model (spiritual communication ability as a mentor, skills to strengthen communication and motivation, attitude to spiritual self-care, the Islamic principles of counseling, skills to strengthen secure attachment to God, the knowledge of counseling). By confirmatory factor analysis, the suitability of the model was confirmed (P=0.000). Cronbach's alpha of 0.969 confirmed the reliability.

Considering the necessity of competency-based education, and assessment of the competency of service providers, it is recommended to use a theory-based questionnaire for longitudinal training of health science students to improve the quality and safety of spiritual health services.