Evaluation of Communication Skills of Child Experts in Developmental Tests: Design and Psychometrics of a Scale

Communication skills have a principal function and value in health and treatment. These skills are essential for child experts, resulting in the clients’ cooperation, satisfaction, and correct diagnosis. This study aims to design a scale to evaluate the communication skills of health center experts in children’s developmental tests.

The research community consisted of experts from health centers in Iran universities of medical sciences. The samples were recruited by purpose-based sampling. This group of experts was used in health centers due to the training of selected experts to perform the developmental Bayley test. First, the evaluation concepts were determined and discussed through a literature review and focused group discussion sessions with 10 experts; the experts were asked to express their opinions and suggestions regarding compiling communication items using the Delphi method. Suggested comments were collected and coded, and the study scale was designed. Then, the psychometric characteristics of the scale were determined with the participation of 16 experts through quantitative content validity and face validity. The scale’s reliability was determined through the test re-test with a 2-week interval, the agreement coefficient in observations was compared between raters and the reference rater, and internal consistency was done. Quantitative data analysis was done in SPSS software, version 22.

In this study, the communication skills scale was designed with 30 items: 13 for communication with children, 6 for communication with parents, and 11 for general items. The lowest content validity index value was related to one item in the communication with the children section. The rest of the items had acceptable validity. The Cronbach α value was 0.81 in communication with the children, 0.82 in communication with the parents, and 0.76 in the general section. The reliability level was 0.83, and the intracluster correlation coefficient was 0.77 in communication with a child, 0.88 in communication with parents, and 0.81 in general. The kappa coefficient for agreement between reference observer and other observers was above 0.7 in 5 cases and less than 0.4 in 2 cases.

The compiled evaluation scale has high validity and reliability and can be used as an evaluation scale of communication skills for child experts.