Development and validation of the treatment expectation scale for patients with liver cancer

Liver cancer is one of the most common tumors in the world. Patients with liver cancer usually face substantial physical, psychological, and social burdens, which has created a great demand and expectation to ease the burden in all aspects. This study aimed to develop and validate the Treatment Expectation Scale for patients with Liver Cancer (TES-LC).

The study was conducted in three phases. In the first stage, we used literature reviews and semi-structured interviews to generate the items to be included in the questionnaire TES-LC (version 1). In the second stage, two rounds of the Delphi expert consultation method were used to modify the first version to form TES-LC (version 2). In the third stage, projects were selected through project analysis and exploratory factor analysis to create TES-LC (version 3); then version 3 was tested for reliability and validity to generate version 4.

The final version of the TES-LC contains 19 items in 5 dimensions: disease symptoms, practical needs, psychological state, emotional satisfaction, and social function. Five common factors were extracted through exploratory factor analysis, explaining 60.11% of the variance. In the validation factor analysis, the fitting effect of the five-factor model was satisfactory after modification. The TES-LC had good internal consistency, with a Cronbach's α coefficient of 0.911 for the total scale.

The TES-LC developed in this study has good reliability and validity and can provide a standardized tool for measuring treatment expectancy in patients with liver cancer, which is of good clinical utility.