Design and validation of the presenteeism scale in nursing

BACKGROUND: The instruments used to measure presenteeism are all flawed and only incompletely measure the concept of presenteeism in employees of the general population. As a result, the concept of presenteeism is not measured, and in most of these instruments, the population for which the instrument has been developed differs from the nursing population. The present research was conducted to design and validate the instrument for evaluating presenteeism in nursing. METHODS: The present study was part of an exploratory sequential mixed study. In this study, the instrument for measuring the level of presenteeism among nurses was developed and validated based on the results of the qualitative stage. To this end, the instrument’s psychometric properties were investigated using face, content, and construct validity, as well as reliability through internal consistency and stability. RESULTS: In this study, an instrument containing 17 items and three dimensions (imperfect cognitive presence, imperfect emotional presence, and imperfect movement presence) with favorable validation characteristics was developed. Therefore, the instrument was able to explain 56.375% of the total variance. Furthermore, Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega coefficients were 0.881 and 0.815, respectively. The intra-cluster correlation coefficient (ICC) was also reported as 0.972 for the entire instrument, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.941 to 0.987. CONCLUSION: Based this study, it was possible to measure the level of nurses’ presenteeism through an instrument with favorable psychometric properties. This study helps health managers lay the groundwork for designing a system for measuring presenteeism among Iranian nurses using the developed instrument. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12912-023-01454-y.