Development and validation of the Children’s Competence in Decision-Making Scale
Intended for healthcare professionals
Evidence and practice    

Development and validation of the Children’s Competence in Decision-Making Scale

Nina Dunne Principal lecturer, School of Health Sciences, University of Brighton, Brighton, England

Background Measuring competence in children’s ability to make decisions about their care is laden with conceptual problems. Although there are a variety of tools to measure competence, no scales have been identified that measured competence in children.

Aim To develop, test and validate a scale that measured competence in the decision-making process of children aged 8-12 years with long-term conditions, called the Children’s Competence in Decision-Making (CCD-M) Scale.

Method A convergent, sequential, mixed-methods validation design was used. Four stages of scale development were used following recommended procedures. The qualitative arm explored the experiences of being involved in decision-making and these insights were used to develop the scale which was then subject to psychometric testing.

Results Cronbach’s α of the overall scale was 0.86, which shows good internal validity. Additionally, the α analysis when items were deleted showed no considerable variation and had no value below 0.7, showing excellent internal validity throughout. No substantial increase in α could be achieved.

Conclusion The CCD-M Scale offers practitioners the ability to test the competence levels of children to decide the extent to which they may want to be involved in the decision-making process. This, in turn, may help to plan care in a more effective way and may have an effect on adherence levels in self-management of illness.

Nursing Children and Young People. doi: 10.7748/ncyp.2019.e1170

Peer review

This article has been subject to open peer review and has been checked for plagiarism using automated software

Correspondence

n.dunne@brighton.ac.uk

Conflict of interest

None declared

Dunne N (2019) Development and validation of the Children’s Competence in Decision-Making Scale. Nursing Children and Young People. doi: 10.7748/ncyp.2019.e1170

Published online: 16 September 2019

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