Advocacy skills assessment guide: a validity study

Nurses should act as individual/patient advocates, since it is part of their basic responsibilities. However, previous studies reported that although nurses know that they need to defend patients, they do not know what patient advocacy is and how to fulfil this role. They have difficulty in advocating for patients and cannot carry it out effectively. This study was conducted to evaluate the advocacy skills of nursing students, develop a guide for the advocacy skills of nurses working in the field, and to verify the content validity.

This guideline development and validation study was conducted in four stages: [1] setting goals for social justice advocacy [2], selecting social justice advocacy skills [3], developing a social justice advocacy skill guide and [4] conducting the pilot study. The development and validation study involved 33 participants, student nurses, licensed nurses, professors, associate professors, assistant professors, and research assistants. For the content validity of the guide, the content validity index, i.e. the percentage of experts who answered 3 or 4 points answered by the experts, was calculated. Kendall W test was used to determine the degree of agreement between the scores of multiple experts.

All content validity index (CVI) scores were in the "good" to "excellent" range. The CVI scores given by all specialists ranged from 0.73 to 1. As a result of the Kendall W test, it was found that there was agreement among the experts (p < 0.001). Public health nurses were asked to evaluate the guide on a scale of 1 to 10 points. The mean score of nurses for the guide as a guideline for their advocacy skills was determined as 9.0 ± 0.816, and 70% of the nurses gave a score of ≥ 9.

The developed 'Advocacy Skills Evaluation Guide' was found to be a valid measurement tool.

Not applicable.