Reliability and validity of the assessment tool for measuring communication skills in nursing simulation education

Abstract

Purpose: This study was conducted to test whether Health Communication Assessment Tool (HCAT) developed by Campbell et al. in 2013 can be applied to assess Korean nursing students' communication skills in simulation education.

Methods: The content validity of the Korean version of HCAT (K-HCAT) was evaluated through expert's assessment and a principal component analysis was conducted for testing construct validity. The convergent validity was tested by measuring relationship between the K-HCAT and those of existing communication assessment tool for standardized patient instruction. The evaluation was done by surveying 154 senior students from four different nursing colleges.

Results: The K-HCAT was condensed into 15 items from the original 22 HCAT items. Four factors were extracted from the principal component analysis; factor loadings ranged from.50 to.83; cumulative explained variance was 62.65%. Four factors were entitled as 'relationship building', 'empowering', 'empathy/response', and 'education/feedback'. Cronbach's α for sub-dimensions ranged from.73 to.84. An evaluation of convergent validity showed that the scores of the K-HCAT were moderately correlated with those of an assessment tool for standardized patient instruction.

Conclusion: The K-HCAT can be used as an effective tool for assessing nursing students' communication skills in various kinds of simulation educations Further research is needed to test the consistency of the K-HCAT.