Measuring exposure to bullying and harassment in health professional students in a clinical workplace environment: Evaluating the psychometric properties of the clinical workplace learning NAQ-R scale

Kelby Smith-Han (Corresponding Author), Emma Collins, Mustafa Asil, Althea Gamble Blakey, Lynley Anderson, Elizabeth Berryman, Tim J Wilkinson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Citations (Scopus)
4 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Background: Instruments that measure exposure to bullying and harassment of students learning in a clinical workplace environment (CWE) that contain validity evidence are scarce. The aim of this study was to develop such a measure and provide some validity evidence for its use.Method: We took an instrument for detecting bullying of employees in the workplace, called the Negative Acts Questionnaire - Revised (NAQ-R). Items on the NAQ-R were adapted to align with our context of health professional students learning in a CWE and added two new factors of sexual and ethnic harassment. This new instrument, named the Clinical Workplace Learning NAQ-R, was distributed to 540 medical and nursing undergraduate students and we undertook a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to investigate its construct validity and factorial structure.Results: The results provided support for the construct validity and factorial structure of the new scale comprising five factors: workplace learning-related bullying (WLRB), person-related bullying (PRB), physically intimidating bullying (PIB), sexual harassment (SH), and ethnic harassment (EH). The reliability estimates for all factors ranged from 0.79 to 0.94.Conclusion: This study provides a tool to measure the exposure to bullying and harassment in health professional students learning in a CWE.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)813-821
Number of pages9
JournalMedical Teacher
Volume42
Issue number7
Early online date14 Apr 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2020

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank all of the Associate Deans of Medical Education for Otago Medical School who assisted with the data collection for this questionnaire, as well as Faculty in The School of Nursing at Otago Polytechnic. We would also like to thank Dr Ella Iosua and Michel de Lange for their initial advice on the analysis of this paper. We would also like to thank the students for their time and effort in completing this questionnaire.

Keywords

  • Education environment
  • undergraduate
  • work-based

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