Development of a scale to measure practitioner adherence to a brief intervention in the emergency department

Brief intervention (BI) can reduce harmful and hazardous drinking among emergency department patients. However, no psychometrically-validated instrument for evaluating the extent to which practitioners correctly implement BIs in clinical practice (e.g., adherence) exists. We developed and subsequently examined the psychometric properties of a scale that measures practitioner adherence to a BI, namely the Brief Negotiation Interview (BNI). Ratings of 342 audiotaped BIs in the emergency department demonstrated that the BNI Adherence Scale (BAS) has: (1) excellent internal consistency and discriminant validity; (2) good to excellent inter-rater reliability, and (3) good construct validity, with an eight-item, two-factor structure accounting for 62% of the variance, but (4) no predictive validity in this study. The BAS provides practitioners with a brief, objective method to evaluate their BNI skills and give feedback to them about their performance.