Evidence-based practice attitude scale for Latinx mental health professionals: a novel application of confirmatory...

The Evidence-Based Practice Attitude Scale (EBPAS) is a widely used measurement tool to assess mental health providers' attitudes toward adopting research-based interventions. To date, this scale has not been used or validated in an interdisciplinary sample of mental health professionals in Latin America. This study investigated the factor structure, psychometric properties, cross-cultural validity, and model fit of the EBPAS in a sample of Spanish-speaking and Latino social workers, counselors, and psychologists.

A culturally and linguistically tailored version of the 15-item EBPAS scale was administered to a sample of Puerto Rican mental health professionals (N = 222) working across various settings, including schools, healthcare clinics, and community organizations. The EBPAS's scores were derived from four distinct constructs involving willingness to adopt EBPs (i.e., requirements, openness to innovation, appeal, and divergence from research). A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) examined the psychometric properties of the EBPAS scale. Several first and second-order factor models were specified. A global and approximate fit examination of the measurement model and composite reliability estimation for each subscale was conducted. RStudio version 4.3.1 software was used for the CFA.

The CFA supported a first-order factor model. Most subscales showed strong reliability coefficients ranging from 0.83 to 0.91, except for the divergence subscale, which showed a coefficient of 0.77. After allowing for covariance between two items in the appeal dimension, the correlated factor model demonstrated a satisfactory fit to the data, although some misspecification was observed.

The tailored EBPAS-15 demonstrated adequate psychometric properties in this Latinx sample of mental health professionals, suggesting that its factor structure and reliability may be useful in a Spanish-speaking and Caribbean sample of mental health professionals working across a variety of settings and contexts. Findings contribute to the scant literature on culturally and linguistically validated measures examining attitudes toward EBPs in Latin America.