TRANSLATION, CULTURAL ADAPTATION AND VALIDATION OF THE “COMMUNITY SERVICE ATTITUDES SCALE” FOR THE PORTUGUESE POPULATION

S. Vicente^1,2, A.C. Vidal^1,2,3, Â.M. Pereira^1,2,3, C.M. Costa^1,3,4

¹Escola Superior da Saúde Egas Moniz, Physiotherapy, Almada, Portugal, ²Centro de Investigação Interdisciplinar Egas Moniz, Almada, Portugal, ³Hospital Garcia de Orta, Physiotherapy, Almada, Portugal, ⁴Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Medicina, Lisboa, Portugal

Background: Learning in recent decades has been changing and new challenges have emerged. The connection between the university and the community is essential to provide real-life experiences. It enables social interactions and cognitive-behavioral learning. Community service learning is an important pedagogical strategy that helps students connect theoretical and practical classroom knowledge with real-life experiences. Despite its importance, there is a lack of instruments to assess students' attitudes towards community service to perceive needs.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to translate, cultural adapt and validate the original version of the Community Service Attitudes Scale (CSAS) into European Portuguese.

Methods: This is a non-experimental study, conducted from July 2022 to January 2023. The CSAS is based on the Schwartz model of altruistic helping behaviors and is divided into four phases perception of need to respond, moral obligation to respond; reassessment and engage in helping behavior. The cultural and linguistic adaptation and validation process was carried out in three phases: Semantic equivalence, Content validity and Internal validation. After contacting the original author, the instrument was translated and back translated from English to European Portuguese. Content validity was carried out by an expert committee composed of three experts in social responsibility/education using the Delphi technique. The expert consensus on item agreement was 80% or more after one round, which allowed for the content validity of the scale. A sample of thirty higher education health students participated in the cognitive pre-test. No questions or comments were made. The last phase consisted of evaluating the internal validity. Ninety-five bachelor health students, responded to the scale, 59,4% women and 40,6% men, age 21.04 (±1.79), 57.3% without previous community experience. Data collection was carried out through the application of an online questionnaire (Google forms). The study was approved by the Egas Moniz Ethics Committee (Process n. 1106 of 30/06/2022) and all students signed the free and informed consent form.

Results: The total CSAS score showed very good values of internal consistency (Cronbach α=.91). Internal consistency scores on the CSAS subscales produced strong evidence of reliability (coefficient alphas ranging from 0.88 to 0.95). The results of the Portuguese validation showed higher values than those of the original authors Shiarella et al. (2000) or Perry (2010) which can be explained by the sample size.

Conclusions: The validity assessment is consistent with previous studies, indicating that the CSAS has been successfully translated and validated into European Portuguese. The CSAS is a valid instrument to assess the community service attitudes of Portuguese higher education students. Ongoing studies are being done to evaluate other psychometric properties.

Implications: Validation of the CSAS in Portuguese allows monitoring the students' community service attitudes and helps to improve the pedagogical strategies.

Funding acknowledgements: No funding

Keywords:
Community service instrument
Professional health education
Validation study

Topics:
Education
Professionalism & ethics
Research methodology, knowledge translation & implementation science

Did this work require ethics approval? Yes

Institution: Escola Superior de Saúde Egas Moniz

Committee: Egas Moniz Ethics Committee

Ethics number: Process n. 1106 of 30/06/2022