Measuring attitude toward family medicine

This study attempts to develop a valid and reliable scale to measure student attitude toward family medicine. It describes a 35-item Likert scale that incorporates the nature of family medicine, the competency of family physicians, and the academic image of family medicine departments. The scale was administered to 116 first-year medical students. Concurrent validity and internal reliability for the scale are reported. Two forms of item analysis--item-to-total-score correlation and factor analysis--resulted in the selection of 23 items for the final scale. Seventy-three percent of the first-year students responding to the scale expressed a positive attitude toward family medicine.