The Italian Validation of the Trust in Medical Researchers-Short Scale: A Cross-Sectional Study

Trust in medical researchers plays a critical role in orienting health-related attitudes and behaviors, which profoundly influence healthcare outcomes, including research participation. This study aimed to contribute to the assessment of this construct by translating and validating the Italian version of the self-administered questionnaire, Trust in Medical Researchers-Short Scale (TMR-SS).

In March 2022, we invited participants from an existing longitudinal cohort to complete an online survey, including socio-demographics, the General Trust Scale (GTS), the Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (VHS), the Edelman Trust in Pharmaceutics Barometer (ETPB), and the Italian back-translated version of the TMR-SS.

Confirmatory Factor Analyses confirmed the unidimensional structure of the original questionnaire, with good to excellent fit indexes. All the items in the original version were retained in the Italian adaptation. Both Cronbach's Alpha and McDonald's Omega indicated acceptable reliability. The Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis indicated that the model was fully invariant across gender. There were no significant associations between the TMR-SS and socio-demographic variables. TMR-SS inversely correlated with the VHS dimensions and positively correlated with the ETPB. There was no significant correlation between the TMR-SS and the GTS.

The Italian version of the TMR-SS proved to be a valid, reliable, and easy-to-administer self-report questionnaire of trust in medical researchers within the Italian context.