Development of an instrument to measure professionalism

To develop and validate an instrument that measures professionalism among pharmacy students and recent graduates.

A pharmacy professionalism survey instrument developed by a focus group was pretested and then administered to all first-year pharmacy students enrolled in the University of Georgia College of Pharmacy and to recent pharmacy graduates who were taking the preparation course for the Georgia Pharmacy Law Examination and North American Pharmacist Licensure Examination. Participants were asked to indicate the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with each of 32 items using a 5-point Likert scale.

One hundred thirty first-year pharmacy students and 101 pharmacy graduates participated in the survey. Statistical analysis identified 6 factors (subscales), which were later named excellence, respect for others, altruism, duty, accountability, and honor/integrity, the 6 tenets of professionalism. Item to total correlations ranged from 0.25 to 0.57 on the 6 factors (subscales), and reliability estimates ranged from 0.72 to 0.85 for the 6 factors and total scale.

The Pharmacy Professionalism Instrument measures the 6 tenets of professionalism and exhibits satisfactory reliability measures. Future studies using this scale in other pharmacy populations are needed.