Developing a scale for measuring professional equity among Canadian physicians

This paper reports on progress made in defining and measuring the concept of professional equity through the development of a summative measure of professional equity and three of its components: financial, intrinsic and recognition equity. The study sample consisted of a stratified sample of 8375 Canadian physicians with usable responses from 2749 (32.8%). Following preliminary components analysis, items were grouped into constructs. Reliability of the constructs was then determined using Cronbachʹs alpha and total inter-item correlations followed by confirmatory factor analysis. A summary scale using all 15 equity items yielded a reliability: Cronbachʹs alpha=0.86. The sub-scales reliabilities were: financial equity (Cronbachʹs alpha=0.91); intrinsic equity (Cronbachʹs alpha=0.86); and recognition equity (Cronbachʹs alpha=0.70). The professional equity measures reported are therefore capable of assessing different aspects of equity and represent an advance over more general effort–reward scales or those that only measure the range of rewards.