How to measure professional discrimination in healthcare settings?
Professional discrimination is one of the most important challenges of inter-professional interaction. To understand and describe this concept from the viewpoints of health team members, a scientific tool is required to measure professional discrimination based on which planning and decision-making will be possible. Materials and
Methods : The present methodological study was conducted in qualitative and quantitative phases. In the first phase, the main aspects of the concept of professional discrimination were defined through extensive literature review and viewpoints of experts and nurses. In the quantitative phase, after designing and extracting the tool items, validity (face, content, and construct) and reliability (internal consistency and stability) of the tool were assessed.
Results : Professional discrimination included some concepts, such as discrimination in employment promotion and access to educational opportunities, disparities in welfare compared to other careers such as physicians, disparities in superiors’ behaviors towards inferiors like nurses in different situations, gender and ethnic discrimination, and the consequences of discrimination. In exploratory factor analysis, scree plot and factor load less than 0.4 showed that the questionnaire included five factors, namely “horizontal and vertical discrimination”, “discrimination consequences”, “inequality due to differences in employment, education, and ethnicity”, and “ethnic and gender discrimination”.
Conclusion : The results showed that the 33-item questionnaire had appropriate validity and reliability. Indeed, an overview of the existing tools showed that the questionnaire represented better than similar ones both in terms of the specificity of measuring the concept and evaluation of psychometric properties. Measurement of professional discrimination could provide health managers and decision-makers with highly accurate and documented information.
Figure 1
Posted 20 Jan, 2020
How to measure professional discrimination in healthcare settings?
Posted 20 Jan, 2020
Professional discrimination is one of the most important challenges of inter-professional interaction. To understand and describe this concept from the viewpoints of health team members, a scientific tool is required to measure professional discrimination based on which planning and decision-making will be possible. Materials and
Methods : The present methodological study was conducted in qualitative and quantitative phases. In the first phase, the main aspects of the concept of professional discrimination were defined through extensive literature review and viewpoints of experts and nurses. In the quantitative phase, after designing and extracting the tool items, validity (face, content, and construct) and reliability (internal consistency and stability) of the tool were assessed.
Results : Professional discrimination included some concepts, such as discrimination in employment promotion and access to educational opportunities, disparities in welfare compared to other careers such as physicians, disparities in superiors’ behaviors towards inferiors like nurses in different situations, gender and ethnic discrimination, and the consequences of discrimination. In exploratory factor analysis, scree plot and factor load less than 0.4 showed that the questionnaire included five factors, namely “horizontal and vertical discrimination”, “discrimination consequences”, “inequality due to differences in employment, education, and ethnicity”, and “ethnic and gender discrimination”.
Conclusion : The results showed that the 33-item questionnaire had appropriate validity and reliability. Indeed, an overview of the existing tools showed that the questionnaire represented better than similar ones both in terms of the specificity of measuring the concept and evaluation of psychometric properties. Measurement of professional discrimination could provide health managers and decision-makers with highly accurate and documented information.
Figure 1