Acknowledging intuition in clinical decision making.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a scale to measure nurses' acknowledgment of using intuition in clinical decision making. Development and validation of the scale was carried out in three phases. In Phase 1, scale items were generated from the published literature in nursing and management and a Content Validity Index (CVI) of .96 was computed on responses from a panel of five experts. In Phase 2, the scale was pilot-tested on a random sample of 106 psychiatric mental health nurses. In Phase 3, the revised scale was presented to a convenience sample of 112 nurses attending continuing education programs. Seven items were found to explain 40.6% of the variance in scores and were retained as the final unidimensional scale. Construct validity was supported by a difference in means of two groups that also differed on another measure of intuition.