The Community Readiness Instrument: A Quantitative Measurement Using Statistical Best Practices to Assess Systemic...

Background: Community readiness assessment is used to gauge a community's ability to address systemic issues and inform action. The Community Readiness Instrument (CRI) is the only published tool to have undergone rigorous development and testing. The purpose of this study is to further refine the CRI and establish its score reliability and validity evidence so that healthcare professionals, community advocates, and researchers have a strong assessment of community readiness. Methods: The present study details continued assessment of the CRI through full-scale testing. We conducted a second-order confirmatory factor analysis to analyze the CRI's six-factor structure. We also conducted Rasch analyses to determine the item-level fit statistics for each subscale. Results: Our results suggest that the CRI is a well-structured quantitative tool with items demonstrating sufficient fit under each first-order latent factor. The items each fell into one-factor solutions, and the six subscales collectively formed a higher-order construct of Community Readiness. The CRI continues to demonstrate strong psychometric properties, score reliability, and validity evidence. Conclusions: Mental health and addiction professionals can use the CRI to explore change readiness toward a specific issue in their communities. Implications for practitioners, community advocates, and future researchers are provided.