Facilitation of patient involvement in care: development and validation of a scale.

The authors describe the development and validation of the Facilitation of Patient Involvement Scale, a 9-item measure of the degree to which patients perceive that their physicians actively facilitate or encourage them to be involved in their own healthcare. They first assessed the unidimensionality of the measure, conducting factor analysis in a pilot study of 236 individuals. Subsequently, they assessed the scale's reliability and validity with additional samples of 333, 338, 44, and 84 participants. Reliability of the scale was very high, with average Cronbach's alpha levels of .91. To test the validity of the scale, they used correlational and multiple regression analyses. The findings indicated that patients' satisfaction with their medical encounters was associated with patients' perceptions of facilitation; that perceptions of facilitation were also moderately correlated with general adherence patterns and preferred communication styles; and that patient age, gender, and education level were not relevant to perceptions that healthcare professionals promote patients' involvement in their own care.