Perceived Organizational Justice in Care Services: creation and multi-sample validation of a measure

Organizational justice (OJ) perceptions predict attitudes and behaviors of customers and employees across a broad range of services. Although OJ has proven predictive power and relevance, it has rarely been studied in health care settings. This stems partially from the lack of a reliable and valid measure of patients' OJ in health care encounters. The objective here was to create and validate a measure of patients' OJ. With that purpose, a survey study with two sampling contexts - the U.S. and Spain - was carried out in order to provide a cross-national validation of the scale in two versions: English (Perceived Organizational Justice in Care Services, PJustCS) and Spanish (Percepción de Justicia Organizacional en el Ámbito Sanitario, PJustAS). Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were used to select the appropriate items in the final version of the instrument. Reliability and validity of the measure were tested. A total of 406 patients in the U.S. and 473 patients in Spain participated. The measures used were the newly created scale of Perceived Organizational Justice in Care Services (PJustCS/PJustAS) and scales of patients' Satisfaction, Trust and Global Justice. Factor Analyses supported the four dimensional structure of the instrument for each group. Multigroup CFA substantiated invariant factor loadings and invariant structural models across both samples, hence, supporting that the instrument is applicable in its two versions: English and Spanish. Validation results showed expected positive relations of OJ with patients' satisfaction, trust in clinicians and global perceived justice. These results point out the importance of health care customers' perceived organizational justice in the explanation of health care dynamics. The scale has desirable psychometric properties and shows adequate validity, contributing to the potential development of the area.