Development and psychometric evaluation of the instrument: attitude toward patient advocacy.

Nurses' patient advocacy can influence patient outcomes. There is a lack of reliable and valid instruments on patient advocacy. The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument to measure nurses' attitudes toward patient advocacy. Bu and Jezewski's theory of patient advocacy and Fishbein and Ajzen's definition of attitude were used to guide the development and evaluation of the scale. Seven experts evaluated scale content validity. Two samples (N = 200; N = 2,500) were randomly selected from the Oncology Nursing Society membership to allow us to examine psychometric properties of the scale. The scale possessed satisfactory psychometric properties. (c) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.