Development and Adaptation of the Nursing Professional Identity Formation Scale to Clinical Nurses

Background and Purpose: As the nursing profession adapts to changing disease patterns and critical care environments, nurses' professional identity continues to evolve. However, empirical evidence suggests a lack of recently developed nursing professional identity formation scales that could serve as future diagnostic tools for assessing professional identity formation among nurses. The purpose of this study was to develop and test the Nursing Professional Identity Formation Scale specifically tailored to assess nurses' professional identity formation in clinical settings. Methods: This observational study involved 447 participants and used exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with parallel classification. Results: We deleted 10 of the 32 original items from the exploratory factor analysis following the Delphi expert panel approach. Thus, the final Nursing Professional Identity Formation Scale had 22 items across four factors (fulfilling professional standards, continuous professional development, professional values and ethics, and maintaining professional roles), which together explained 72.04% of the total variance. A second-order confirmatory factor termed "nursing professional identity formation" with 17 items (root mean square residual = .054) was identified using a second-order confirmatory factor analysis. The Nursing Professional Identity Formation Scale scores differed across nursing position levels, indicating good convergent validity. The final Nursing Professional Identity Formation Scale had a Cronbach's alpha of .94 (range = .86-.90 for the four subscales). Conclusions: The Nursing Professional Identity Formation Scale was validated to fit the data adequately. It can evaluate clinical nurses' professional identity formation and can be used to develop educational strategies to promote their professional identity.