Cultural adaptation and content validation of the Watson Caritas patient instrument for a Latin American Spanish context

Abstract

Background:

Humanisation in health services, central to global healthcare systems, emphasises making care more person-centred and compassionate. Person-centred care is central to nursing practice. The transpersonal Caritas relationship exemplifies such person-centred care, and can be evaluated using the Watson Caritas Patient Score (WCPS), which captures patients’ subjective perceptions of nursing behaviours.

Aims:

To evaluate the validity and reliability of the WCPS instrument in a Spanish context, with hospitalised patients. An analysis was undertaken using the Rasch methodology to test the robustness of the tool in diverse conditions and populations.

Methods:

A validation study was undertaken to assess the WCPS tool’s cultural adaptation, reliability, and validity. Ethical approval was obtained, alongside authorisation to use the instrument. The Rasch methodology was chosen as it provides a robust and theoretically grounded approach to instrument validation.

Results:

The global content validity index was 0.80. Cronbach’s α was 0.84 in the first and 0.86 in the second. Factor analysis extracted a single factor with an explanatory power of 65%. The Rasch reliability was 0.88 for items with adequate fit.

Conclusions:

The Spanish version of the WCPS has been validated and is a useful tool for measuring the Caritas transpersonal relationship in hospitals, promoting person-centred nursing care. However, the Rasch model validation highlighted the need for further refinement, including adding more questions to address measurement gaps and collapsing categories to reduce data variability under a unidimensional construct.