Measuring parents' perceptions of care: psychometric development of a research instrument.

This article describes the development and testing of a research instrument called Parents' Perceptions of Care (PPC). It is designed to measure the interaction between health care professionals and family members in situations where a child aged 1 to 3 years is in need of acute hospital care. Administered to the child's parents or other persons responsible for the child's care, PPC was developed using four concept categories drawn from Maijala's substantive theory of interaction. The instrument was piloted with 91 parents recruited from four hospitals in southern Finland. The construct validity of the scale was assessed by item analysis, and internal consistency was assessed by Cronbach's alpha values. The results of the statistical analysis are sufficient to encourage further psychometric development.