Development and psychometric evaluation of nurse's intention to care for patients with infectious disease scale: an exploratory sequential mixed method study

Aims Nurses who care for patients with infectious disease may experince significant stress and negative psychological reactions. The intention of nurses to care is a complex and multifaceted concept that is influenced by a range of factors. Therefore, this study was conducted to explain the concept of nurses' intention to care for patients with infectious disease and then develop a reliable and valid scale to measure this concept accurately in Iranian nurses. Design This study is a cross-sectional study with a sequential-exploratory mixed-method approach from May 2022 to July 2023. The concept of nurses' intent to care for patients with infectious disease was explain using deductive content analysis, and item pools were generated. In the sconed step the samples were 455 nurses. Data was collected by an online form questionnaire using a convenience sampling technique. In this step to determine the psychometric properties of nurse's intention to care for patients with infectious disease scale (NICPS), face and content validity performed. Then construct validity was determined and confirmed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis followed by convergent and divergent validity respectively. Finally, scale reliability including stability and internal consistency were evaluated. Results The finding showed that NICPS with seventeen items were classified into three factors namely "Social support" with seven items, "Spiritual motivation" with six items and "Job satisfaction" with four items. These three factors explained 56.14% of the total variance. The fit indices showed that the model has a fit and acceptable (TLI, CFI, IFI > 0.9; PNFI, PCFI > 0.5, REMSEA > 0.049, CMIN/DF = 2.477). Reliability revealed acceptable internal consistency and stability (> 0.7). Conclusion The finding showed that NICPS has three factors in Iranian nurses. Nursing managers can use these results to provide training and support intervention for nurses in order to increase their intention to care for this patient. Also, the NICPS is a reliable and valid for evaluating this concept in future studies.