Abstract
Background:
Respiratory therapists (RTs) are allied healthcare professionals, responsible for cardiopulmonary care in healthcare settings, and RT students play a significant role in strengthening various aspects of healthcare in the future, with the evolving trends in inpatient care. There are no validated instruments to evaluate students’ perception of their careers and satisfaction with the learning resources. The primary objective of the current study is to develop and validate a structured questionnaire (SQ) for RT students encompassing all the components of their career development and satisfaction.
Methods:
Proceeding from the literature review and content validation by RT experts through focused group discussions, a reliable SQ was generated with 48 items based on the Likert scale. After receiving ethical clearance from the institutional review board, the SQ was administered to 904 RT students across the country using an online survey platform. We performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) for the global fit. Cronbach's alpha was performed to estimate the internal consistency.
Results:
The PCA generated a 4-factor model, and internal consistency for the total scale exceeded the standard criterion of >0.70. Satisfactory goodness of fit data was yielded from CFA. Average variances extracted were higher than the correlation coefficients of the factors, which show sufficient discriminant validity.
Conclusions:
This study shows a clinically acceptable model, it fits and suggests the possibility of applying SQ to an RT student with relatively good construct validity and internal consistency, based on the results of CFA.
The model fit the data adequately with a good GFI (0.92), TLI (0.97) and RMSEA (0.06). The raw χ 2 is 198 and χ 2 /df is 4.9 with p-value < 0.01
View all access options for this article.Confirmatory Factor Analysis Process for scale
χ2
RMSEA
TLI
CFI
GFI
χ 2 /df
P value
198
0.06
0.97
0.94
0.92
4.9
0.01
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