Portuguese Community Pharmacists' Attitudes to and Knowledge of Antibiotic Misuse: Questionnaire Development and Reliability

OBJECTIVE: To develop and evaluate the reliability of a self-administered questionnaire designed to assess the attitudes and knowledge of community pharmacists in Portugal about microbial resistance and the antibiotic dispensing process. METHODS: This study was divided into the following three stages: (1) design of the questionnaire, which included a literature review and a qualitative study with focus-group sessions; (2) assessment of face and content validity, using a panel of experts and a pre-test of community pharmacists; and, (3) pilot study and reliability analysis, which included a test-retest study covering fifty practising pharmacists based at community pharmacies in five districts situated in Northern Portugal. Questionnaire reproducibility was quantified using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC; 95% confidence interval) computed by means of one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Internal consistency was evaluated using Cronbach's alpha. RESULTS: The correlation coefficients were fair to good (ICC>0.4) for all statements (scale-items) regarding knowledge of and attitudes to antibiotic resistance, and ranged from fair to good to excellent for statements about situations in which pharmacists acknowledged that antibiotics were sometimes dispensed without a medical prescription (ICC>0.8). Cronbach's alpha for this section was 0.716. CONCLUSIONS: The questionnaire designed in this study is valid and reliable in terms of content validity, face validity and reproducibility.