Validation of the attitudes towards people living with HIV/AIDS scale in nursing students

BACKGROUND: One of the environments where people living with HIV/AIDS should feel safer is in the health care setting; however, scientific evidence has identified discriminatory behaviour on the part of health care professionals towards these people. The reduction or abolition of discriminatory practices requires, first of all, to know the attitudes of nursing students towards AIDS with tools appropriate to the socio-cultural context of the disease. The objectives of this study are to update the AIDS Attitudes Scale for Nursing Students (EASE) by adapting it to the sociocultural landscape and to analyse the reliability and structural validity of the new scale. METHODS: The results of the questionnaires answered by 213 undergraduate nursing students from the Faculty of Health Sciences of Ceuta (University of Granada) were analysed. Reliability (test-retest, n = 33) and validity (n = 180) tests were carried out. RESULTS: An exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a four-factor model was the most parsimonious solution. Items were examined for their underlying relationships and labelled: professional practice, social integration, partner and family, and benevolent stigma. The new scale yielded a McDonald’s Omega coefficient (ω) of 0.893. Convergent validity was established for average variance extracted per factor greater than 0.5 and divergent validity when the variance retained by each factor is greater than the variance shared between them (average variance extracted per factor > ϕ2). CONCLUSIONS: The new scale is a psychometrically sound instrument for assessing attitudes towards people living with HIV/AIDS in nursing students. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12912-023-01414-6.