Construct validity of Attitudes Towards Vaccinations Scale (ATVS)-part 2

Understanding patients' motives for or against taking vaccination can enhance effectivity of doctors' efforts to motivate their older patients to the advantageous health choices. We developed a tool Attitudes Towards Vaccination Scale (ATVS) assessing senior's attitudes towards vaccination uptake. In this article we demonstrate the relationship between constructs measured by the scale and five well-established psychological concepts, such as anxiety, locus of control, level of self-efficacy, health-related behaviours and styles of coping with stress.MethodThe validation was performed on a sample of individuals aged 60 and more recruited in rural and urban outpatient services (n = 85). We assessed divergent and convergent aspects of construct validity by correlating the ATVS Positive Attitude subscale (PA-subscale) and Negative Attitude subscale (NA-subscale) with other psychometric tools, such as State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale (MHLC), Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES), Inventory of Health-Related Behaviours (IHRB), Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS). We estimated also known group differences.ResultsThe PA-subscale correlated positively with all subscales of HRBI, task-oriented style of coping, and internal locus of health control. The NA-subscale correlated negatively with task-oriented style of copying, generalized self-efficacy and internalized locus of control, while positively with anxiety the trait, external locus of health control (based on chance) and the emotion-oriented style of coping.ConclusionsThe results of the study confirmed the construct validity of the ATVS. We believe our tool may be used in a clinical practice to apply more appropriate strategies to encourage older patients to take vaccines.