Psychometric properties of the Norwegian Person-centred Climate Questionnaire from a nursing home context.

BACKGROUND: The physical and psychosocial environments in nursing homes influence the residents' everyday life as well as their well-being and thriving. The staff's perceptions of and relationships with the residents are crucially important to quality care. Quality care is described often as person-centred. Few measurement tools exist that focus on person-centred care in nursing homes.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Norwegian version of the Person-centred Climate Questionnaire-Staff version (PCQ-S).

DESIGN: This study had a cross-sectional survey design.

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTINGS: Two hundred and nine healthcare and support staff in five nursing homes in the eastern part of Norway.

METHODS: The Swedish PCQ-S was translated into Norwegian with forward and backward translation. The relevance of the items included in the questionnaire was assessed by an expert panel of 10 nursing home care staff, because the questionnaire has not been used in this context previously. A psychometric evaluation using statistical estimates of validity and reliability was performed. The discriminatory capacity of the questionnaire was also tested.

RESULTS: The content validity index was satisfactory (0.78). The PCQ-S showed high internal consistency reliability in that Cronbach's α was satisfactory for the total scale (0.92) and the three subscales (0.81, 0.89 and 0.87). The test-retest reliability was also satisfactory as evident from a Spearman's correlation coefficient of 0.76 (p < 0.01) between the total PCQ scores at test and retest. The Norwegian version retained the original factor structure of the Swedish version.

CONCLUSION: As the psychometric evaluation showed satisfactory validity and reliability scores, this study supports the Norwegian version of the PCQ-S when applied to a sample of nursing home staff.