Spanish adaptation of The Penn State College of Medicine Scale to assess professionalism in medical students

Abstract

Introduction: Professionalism is a subject of interest in medical schools around the world. The use of a questionnaire could be useful to assess professionalism in Colombia.

Objective: To adapt The Penn State University College of Medicine Professionalism Questionnaire as a culturally valid instrument in the Spanish language.

Materials and methods: We followed recommendations from the IQOLA project and used forward and back translation with four independent translations, as well as a pilot evaluation and an evaluation of psychometric features with 250 students. We evaluated item-scale correlations and internal consistency with Chronbach´s alpha test and conducted a principal components factor analysis.

Results: Global Cronbach´s alpha was 0.86, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was 0.83, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity had a p>0.00001. We found six factors that explained 93% of the total variance and four new factors emerged in the factor analysis, while eight items had high uniqueness.

Conclusion: The Penn State University College of Medicine Scale measures professionalism attitudes in medical students with good reliability. However, the structure of the scale demonstrated differences when used in the Latin American medical student population.