Reliability and validity of the Women's Health Care Skills Audit

The Women's Health Care Skills Audit (WHCSA) is a behaviorally oriented instrument which is hypothesized to measure important, clinically relevant components of the basic women's health care skills of Family Nurse Practitioners. The purpose of this research was to examine the reliability and validity of the WHCSA. Two women's health care nurse practitioners independently evaluated the performance of 23 Family Nurse Practitioner students during client visits. Overall internal consistency and test-retest reliabilities of the instrument were high--.96 and .84 respectively. In addition, support for the convergent validity of the WHCSA was also obtained in the study. Results therefore indicate that the WHCSA is both reliable and valid and holds promise for use in documenting and evaluating basic Family Nurse Practitioner women's health care competencies.