Design and Validation of Behavioral Skills Promotion of Health Volunteers Questionnaire in Disasters

Health volunteers are the main components of the health care system in dealing with critical situations.

The purpose of this study was to design and validate the behavioral skills promotion of health volunteers questionnaire in disasters in Iran.

This study with descriptive and psychometric methods was conducted in 2022. Based on focus groups and extracted categories, a 50-item questionnaire was designed. A five-point Likert (totally agree 5, totally disagree 1) was used to score the questionnaire. The questionnaire’s questions were reviewed by 14 experts, and after content validity with Lawshe's formula, four questions were removed and the number of questions was reduced to 43 questions. In this stage, 500 Red Crescent volunteers completed the questionnaire. Then, by examining the factor analysis, five questions did not factor loads and were discarded. Finally, 38 questions remained. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the behavioral skills promotion of health volunteer’s questionnaire model was fitted.

The findings of this study indicated that this questionnaire has good validity for the whole questionnaire and factors with Cronbach's alpha coefficient method. Moreover, the factor analysis results indicated that there were seven factors, which explained 60.52% of the total variance.

According to the obtained results, the questionnaire on behavioral skills promotion of health volunteers in disasters is a valid and reliable instrument in the case of critical situations in Iran.