Attitudes toward End-of-Life Resuscitation: A Psychometric Evaluation of a Novel Attitude Scale

With the advent of an aging society and the development of end-of-life care, there is an increasing need to understand the older generation's attitude toward end-of-life resuscitation. The study aimed to develop and validate a novel attitude scale toward end-of-life resuscitation in older inpatients.

Instrumental development and a psychometric evaluation were used. First, a new attitude scale toward end-of-life resuscitation was formulated from literature views, expert content validity, and face validity. Next, the new scale was evaluated using a principal component analysis and internal consistency reliability in a sample from 106 medical-surgical inpatients in a southern Taiwan hospital 1 enrolled through convenience sampling. Serving as an indicator of concurrent validity, a logistic regression analysis was performed to analyze the association between scores on the scale and intention to discuss end-of-life CPR issues.

After being validated by the expert content validity and face validity, a draft of a 20-item scale was created. Throughout the exploratory factor analysis, two items with low factor loadings were removed from the draft scale and an 18-item scale of attitude was generated. This 18-item scale had a three-factor structure that accounted for 64.1% of the total variance; the three components were named 'stress, avoidance, and ignorance', 'a peaceful death', and 'self-determination and ambivalence'. The Cronbach's alpha of the total scale and three components were 0.845, 0.885, 0.879, and 0.857, respectively, which indicated a favorable reliability. Scores on the scale were significantly associated with the intention to discuss end-of-life CPR issues, which also indicated a favorable concurrent validity.

A 18-item attitude scale with three factors is a valid scale to measure the attitude toward end-of-life resuscitation. The result provides preliminary evidence of the psychometric properties of the scale. Further research with larger samples or other populations is required.