Development of professional autonomy scale for certified care workers

Abstract

[Objective] Certified care workers have to achieve professional autonomy required for all professionals to demonstrate their expertise. This study aims to develop a professional autonomy scale for certified care workers and examine the reliability and validity of the scale. [Methods] An anonymous self-registered questionnaire survey was conducted among 4,000 certified care workers working in 400 special nursing-care homes for the aged nationwide in Japan. Excluding the responses with missing values, 614 responses were included in the factor analysis. [Results] The analysis yielded a scale with 38 items in 7 factors. The Cronbach’s α coefficient to measure reliability was 0.961 for the entire scale. The goodness-of-fit indices were CFI=0.921 and RMSEA=0.055. [Conclusions] It was established that the professional autonomy scale for the certified care workers developed in this study has sufficient reliability and validity.