Parental self-efficacy in managing the home care of children with Hirschsprung's disease or anorectal malformation: Development and validation of a new measure

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to develop a scale specifically to measure parental self-efficacy (PSE) in managing the home care of children with Hirschsprung's disease (HD) or anorectal malformation (AM) (the PSE-HDAM scale), and to validate its psychometric properties. Methods: The PSE-HDAM Scale was developed through focus group with parents and Delphi questionnaire responses of experts. A total of 230 parents of children with HD or AM were recruited to fill the PSE-HDAM, the Chinese version of the Tool to Measure Parenting Self-Efficacy (TOPSE), and the Holschneider Criteria. Content validity was measured using the Content Validity Index. Principal Component Analysis was conducted to identify dimensions of the scale. Cronbach's Alpha and Guttman's Split-Half Reliability Coefficient were used to evaluate the internal consistency of the scale. External validity was measured using the Pearson correlation coefficient between PSE-HDAM, and the Chinese version of the TOPSE and Holschneider Criteria. Results: Principal Component Analysis identified five domains of the PSE-HDAM scale. The final version of the scale consisted of 19 items. The content validity was 0.89. The correlations between items and the total scale ranged between 0.75 and 0.87. The overall scale and subscales have good to excellent internal consistency (Cronbach ɑ ranged 0.67 to 0.91), and the Split-Half Coefficient of the whole scale is 0.85. The correlation between PSE-HDAM score and the TOPSE and the Holschneider Criteria was 0.68 and 0.32 respectively (p < .001). Conclusions: The PSE-HDAM is a reliable and valid scale to evaluate PSE in managing home care of children with HD or AM.