The cross-cultural (transcultural) adaptation and validation of the nursing image questionnaire

Education of nurses in the Republic of Croatia is being developed as a result of compliance with education in the European Union and the implementation of nursing research that leads to the growth of the whole profession. However, prejudice against the nursing profession is still present and therefore it is necessary to explore the attitudes of the general population and the population of nurses in the nursing profession in order to discover the causes of such prejudices and act on them. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to present transcultural adaptation and validation of the Nursing Image Questionnaire, which was created by Toth and associates (1998). The questionnaire, which includes 30 items and measures how an individual looks at the roles, values, and professional activities of nurses, was conducted as part of a preliminary study and was culturally adapted. The final study included 905 students who in 2011 and 2012 enrolled in the first year of full-time and part-time nursing study; the questionnaire was completed by 725 students. Toth and associates assumed that the attitude toward nursing is expressed as the sum of the responses of all the items, which would mean a factor structure with high item intercorrelation, but they also split the questionnaire into five thematic units. Results showed that, contrary to expectations, intercorrelations of items were extremely low and that following the completion of factor analysis, no satisfactory construct validity was established. From the obtained results, it can be concluded that it is not justified to create a latent dimension as established by research of Toth and associates, and the items, although there is a correlation between some of them, should be interpreted and analysed as independent constructs.