Designing and Psychometric Properties of Appraisal Adherence to Care and Treatment Scale in Liver Transplantation Recipients

Background: Care and treatment adherence are important factors for given good liver transplantation outcomes. Objectives: Design and validate an instrument to appraise adherence to care and treatment in liver transplantation recipients. Methods: A mixed-methods sequential exploratory study was conducted in two phases from 2017 to 2019, in the Liver Transplantation Clinic Tehran, Iran. In the qualitative phase, the concept of care and treatment adherence in liver transplantation recipients extracted by a conventional content analysis was performed on semi-structural interviews that were conducted on 18 liver transplantation recipients that were recruited through purposive sampling technique. Also, two physicians, one nurse coordinator of the liver transplantation team, and two family members were interviewed. The scale was developed based on operational definitions extracted from the qualitative phase. The validity was assessed by face, content, construct validity, and confirmatory factor analysis. The reliability was also evaluated by calculating test-retest intraclass correlation coefficient and Cronbach’s alpha. The exploratory factor analysis was carried out with 286 filled the questionnaire. Results: Four factors were extracted in factor analysis. These factors explained 45.622% of the variance. The final version of the scale consisted of 20 items. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient reported as 0.889 for the total scale and the intraclass correlation coefficient was reported as 0.912. The confirmatory factor analysis led to a fitting model. Chi-square indices were reported as CMIN/DF = 2.34, NFI = 0.94, CFI = 0.96, and RAMSEA = 0.067. Conclusions: With a four factors structure, validity and reliability of adherence to care and treatment scale are acceptable; therefore, it can be used for appraisal care and treatment adherence in liver transplant recipients.