Evidence-based practice attitude scale

Description

This tool examines attitudes toward evidence-based practice among social service providers who specialize in child and adolescent mental health (Aarons, 2004). The initial study to create this evidence-based practice attitude scale was based on participation by over 322 clinical and case management service providers and 51 program managers from public sector programs.

The tool includes 15 questions regarding clinician and case manager willingness to adopt evidence-based practices give the appeal of evidence-based practice, system, organization, or supervisor requirements for evidence-based practices, the clinician or case manager’s degree of openness to innovation, and the perceived importance of using research-based interventions as part of practice.

While this tool was not created for public health, it can be used without adaptation in any public health setting or discipline. For example, a public health program manager could use the evidence-based practice attitude scale to assess staff perceptions of using evidence for public health interventions and decision-making. The methodological rating for this tool is “strong”.

Steps for Using Method/Tool

Administration and scoring instructions are available from the author.

Evaluation

This instrument has received initial testing of its psychometric properties to produce a 15-item tool. Further evaluation of the tool is required to test its psychometric properties among public health providers and across varied organizational settings.

Validity

Face and content validity were described and involved researchers, mental health clinicians and other mental health service providers (Aarons, 2004). Factor analysis was completed and provides some initial evidence for convergence and consistency (Aarons). Results of a study testing the association between organizational culture and climate with mental health provider attitudes toward adoption of evidence-based practice provided additional support for tool validation (Aarons & Sawitzky, 2006).This tool would benefit from continued examination of criterion and construct validity. The article, "Transformational and Transactional Leadership: Association with Attitudes Toward Evidence-Based Practice", further provides evidence for validity of the EBPAS (Aarons, 2006).

Reliability

Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted in the original scale development study (Aarons, 2004) and a further study provided item factor loadings and item-total correlations to evaluate and test domain structure for the tool in a more geographically diverse sample (Aarons, McDonald, Sheehan, & Walrath-Greene, 2007). Chronbach’s alpha was used to assess internal consistency reliability which ranged from high to moderate with requirements (3 items; α=0.93), appeal (4 items; α = 0.74), openness (4 items; α=0.81), divergence (4 items; α=0.66), and EBPAS Total (15-items; α=0.79. Test-retest reliability was not assessed and inter-rater reliability does not pertain to this type of measure.