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Background & objectives: Assessing healthcare seeking behaviour (HSB), healthcare utilization and related out-of-pocket expenditures of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) of India through a prism of the health system may help to achieve equitable health outcomes. Therefore, this comprehensive study was envisaged to examine these issues among PVTGs of Odisha, India. However, there exists no validated questionnaire to measure these variables among PVTGs. Therefore, a study questionnaire was developed for this purpose and validated. Methods: Questionnaire was constructed in four phases: questionnaire development, validity assessment, pilot testing and reliability assessment. Nine domain experts face validated questionnaire in two rounds, followed by a single round of quantitative content validity. Next, the questionnaire was pretested in three rounds using cognitive interviews and pilot-tested among 335 and 100 eligible individuals for the two sections healthcare seeking behaviour (HSB-Q) and maternal and child healthcare service utilization (MCHSU-Q). Internal consistency reliability was assessed for de novo HSB-Q. Results: On two rounds of expert-driven face validity, 55 items were eliminated from 200 items. Questionnaire showed moderate to high content validity (item-level content validity index range: 0.78 to 1, scale-level content validity index/universal agreement: 0.73; scale-level content validity index/average: 0.96 and multirater kappa statistics range: 0.6 to 1). During the pre-test, items were altered until saturation was achieved. Pilot testing helped to refine interview modalities. The Cronbach alpha and McDonald’s omega assessing internal consistency of HSB-Q were 0.8 and 0.85, respectively. Interpretation & conclusions: The questionnaire was found to be valid and reliable to explore healthcare seeking behaviour, maternal and child healthcare utilization and related out-of-pocket expenditure incurred by PVTGs of Odisha, India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Sedentary behaviors (SB) are very prevalent nowadays. Prolonged sitting associates with chronic disease risks and increased mortality even while controlling for physical activity. Objective measurement of SB is costly, requires technical expertise, and is challenging in terms of time and management. Currently, there is no validated self-reported instrument in the Arabic language that assesses SB among individuals and relates sedentary time to social, environmental, and health outcomes. The aim of this research was to develop a multi-item Arabic SB questionnaire (ASBQ). Methods: The ASBQ was developed through an extensive literature review and discussion by the research team (n = 5), then went through content validation (n = 10 experts) and pre-testing using cognitive interviewing procedures (n = 51 respondents, mean (SD) age was 38.3 (18.2) years, and with 49% females). Results: The ASBQ included 13 questions comprising a wide range of sedentary activities. The Arabic SB instrument showed excellent content validity for assessing sedentary time in adolescents and adults with a very high item-level and scale-level content validity index. A kappa statistic, a measure of interrater reliability, was 0.95. The pre-testing showed that the instrument was highly rated by a diverse sample of Saudi adolescents and adults. Conclusion: The ASBQ received excellent acceptance by a panel of experts with promising pre-test results. Further testing of psychometric properties, including test-retest reliability and criterion validity is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To translate the pregnancy physical activity questionnaire (PPAQ) into Arabic language, cross-culturally adapt and test its reliability and validity among Saudi pregnant women. Methods: Pregnancy physical activity questionnaire, which consisted of 36 items, was translated to Arabic following the World Health Organization's guidelines for tool translation (forward translation, expert panel and back translation, pretesting and cognitive interviewing, and final version), followed by validation by experts. This is a cross-sectional study and data were collected from 118 healthy pregnant Saudi women from May to June 2019. Validity included content validity indices (CVI) and construct validity by Rasch analysis. Reliability was assessed by test-retest reliability and Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Results: The mean age of the participants was 30.15±5.59 years; 38.2% of them had normal pre-gestational body mass index (n=45). The median of total energy expenditure in physical activity was 356.1 METs.h/ week (IQR=162.3-648.3). Item content validity index was good ranging between 0.8-1. Rasch analysis showed good construct validity and excellent reliability for all types of physical activity (>0.89). Conclusion: This Arabic PPAQ is a reliable and valid tool that can be used in Arab countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Situational judgment tests (SJTs) are used in health sciences education to measure examinee knowledge using case-based scenarios. Despite their popularity, there is a significant gap in the validity research on the response process that demonstrates how SJTs measure their intended constructs. A model of SJT response processes has been proposed in the literature by Robert Ployhart; however, few studies have explored and expanded the factors. The purpose of this study was to describe the factors involved in cognitive processes that examinees use as they respond to SJT items in a health professions education context. Methods: Thirty participants—15 student pharmacists and 15 practicing pharmacists—completed a 12-item SJT designed to measure empathy. Each participant engaged in a think-aloud interview while completing the SJT, followed by a cognitive interview probing their decision-making processes. Interviews were transcribed and independently coded by three researchers to identify salient factors that contributed to response processes. Results: The findings suggest SJT response processes include all four stages (comprehension, retrieval, judgment, and response selection) as initially proposed by Ployhart. The study showed factors from other published research were present, including job-specific knowledge and experiences, emotional intelligence, and test-taking. The study also identified new factors not yet described, including identifying a task objective in the scenario, assumptions about the scenario, perceptions about the scenario, and the setting of the item. Conclusions: This study provides additional SJT validity evidence by exploring participants' response processes through cognitive and think-aloud interviews. It also confirmed the four-stage model previously described by Ployhart and identified new factors that may influence SJT response processes. This study contributes to the literature with an expanded SJT response process model in a health professions education context and offers an approach to evaluate SJT response processes in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of students' prior knowledge to their current learning outcomes cannot be overemphasised. Students with adequate prior knowledge are better prepared for the current learning materials than those without the knowledge. However, assessment of engineering students' prior mathematics knowledge has been beset with a lack of uniformity in measuring instruments and inadequate validity studies. This study attempts to provide evidence of validity and reliability of a Norwegian national test of prior mathematics knowledge using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach. This approach involves use of an item response theory model followed by cognitive interviews of some students among 201 first-year engineering students that constitute the sample of the study. The findings confirm an acceptable construct validity for the test with reliable items and a high-reliability coefficient of .92 on the whole test. Mixed results are found on discrimination and difficulty indices of questions on the test with some questions having unacceptable discriminations and require improvement, some are easy, and some appear too tricky questions for students. Results from the cognitive interviews reveal the likely reasons for students' difficulty on some questions to be lack of proper understanding of the questions, text misreading, improper grasping of word-problem tasks, and unavailability of calculators. The findings underscore the significance of validity and reliability checks of test instruments and their effect on scoring and computing aggregate scores. The methodological approaches to validity and reliability checks in the present study can be applied to other national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]