Reliability and Validity of Chinese Version of the Perceived Competence Scale for Disaster Mental Health Workforce: A Cross-Sectional Study

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to translate the English version of the Perceived Competence Scale for Disaster Mental Health Workforce (PCS-DMHW) into Chinese, and to test its reliability and validity in Chinese mental health workers. METHODS: With the consent of Professor Choi, Keimyung University, Korea, and the authorization of the scale, the English version of PCS-DMHW was translated, retranslated and culturally debugged to form the Chinese version of PCS-DMHW. The general information questionnaire and the Chinese version of PCS-DMHW scale were used to investigate 706 mental health workforce from 9 tertiary hospitals in Sichuan province in China from March 24, 2020 to April 14, 2020. The Cronbach’s α coefficient was used to evaluate the internal consistency reliability of the scale, and the test-retest correlation coefficient r was used to evaluate the test-retest reliability of the scale. The content validity indexes (CVI) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used separately for evaluating the content validity and structure validity of the scale. RESULTS: The Cronbach’s α coefficient of the Chinese version of PCS-DMHW total scale, individual competences and organizational competences subscale was 0.978, 0.956, and 0.964, respectively. The test-retest reliability of the total scale, individual competences and organizational competences subscale was 0.949, 0.932 and 0.927, respectively. The item-level CVI of all scale were ranged from 0.833–1.000, the scale-level CVI (S-CVI)/universal agreement of the total scale, individual competences and organizational competences subscale was 0.833, 0.875, and 0.857, respectively, and the S-CVI/average was 0.972, 0.979, and 0.976, respectively. EFA showed that two principal components were extracted from the subscale of individual competences and organizational competences. CONCLUSION: The Chinese version of PCS-DMHW has good reliability and validity, and can be widely used in China.