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Children with Asthma and Communication with Healthcare Provider: Instrument Development
Insights
This study validated a communication instrument subscale for children with asthma, ensuring age-appropriateness and readability. Findings enhance child-centered communication in healthcare settings.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric Healthcare Communication
- Asthma Management Tools
- Patient-Reported Outcomes
Background:
- Effective communication is crucial for managing childhood asthma.
- Children are often excluded from healthcare discussions, impacting symptom recognition and response.
- Existing instruments may not adequately capture children's perspectives on provider communication.
Purpose of the Study:
- To assess the content validity of an instrument subscale measuring communication between children with asthma and healthcare providers.
- To evaluate the age appropriateness, readability, and clarity of the subscale for pediatric asthma patients.
- To improve the inclusion of children in triadic discussions involving healthcare providers and caregivers.
Main Methods:
- Mixed-methods explanatory sequential design.
- Qualitative focus groups enriched a 15-item questionnaire.
- Tested with 25 children aged 8-12 with asthma.
Main Results:
- Children's perspectives provided valuable insights for subscale development.
- The subscale demonstrated strong internal consistency (Cronbach's Alpha = 0.85).
- Readability analysis confirmed the items are suitable for a 6th-grade reading level; children found them clear.
Conclusions:
- The validated subscale is age-appropriate, readable, and clear for children with asthma.
- The findings support the inclusion of children in healthcare communication, moving beyond a dyadic to a triadic model.
- Future research will focus on reliability and factor analysis of the full instrument.
Purpose:
Communication among healthcare providers, caregivers and children with asthma is challenging and sometimes may exclude the child. This may result in delay in recognizing and responding appropriately to asthma symptoms. The purpose was to test an instrument's subscale for content validity related to communication with the healthcare provider by examining age appropriateness, readability and clarity for children with asthma.
Design And Methods:
This was a mixed method explanatory sequential design to examine age appropriateness, readability and clarity for a 15-item subscale of an instrument for children. The qualitative arm (focus groups) was used to enrich the questionnaire. The sample included children ages 8 to 12 with asthma (N = 25).
Results:
The perspective of children with asthma provided enriched information to influence the development of instrument subscale on communication.
Conclusions:
The subscale revealed internal consistency with Cronbach Alpha 0.85. One of the children reported that using the term "provider" was clearer as oppose to healthcare provider. Children participating in the study found readable and clear. A readability analysis revealed the items were readable at a 6th grade level.
Practice Implication:
Although the instrument is designed for primary care providers (physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants), the information gained from this pilot increases understanding about including the child in a triadic discussion. Further research will lead to next step toward computing reliability of the full measure and a factor analysis.
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