ABSTRACT
Violence against women is a worldwide problem with extensive repercussions. Primary care physicians frequently are the first in the community to encounter the battered woman. They must be equipped with the necessary knowledge, training and experience. We developed a questionnaire to obtain information from the physicians and nurses on various aspects of domestic violence [DV] The aim of this study was to test the reliability and validity of this questionnaire to evaluate knowledge and attitude of primary care providers towards DV. This study was carried out in 5 primary health care centers on 10 physicians and 10 nurses who were asked to complete a self-administered close-ended questionnaire that included 4 main aspects relevant to DV, namely knowledge, attitude, causes and topics that participants were interested in to be included in training workshops. Each domain consisted of a number questions [items]. Test-retest reliability was tested by Spearman's correlation coefficients. To evaluate for internal consistency, parity co-variances were used to estimate Cronbach' alpha. Discrimination between participant groups [physicians and nurses] was tested by Mann-Whitney test. Spearman's correlation was utilized to test the correlations between different domains to evaluate the convergent validity. Test re-test reliability of the questionnaire revealed that all scales were reliable, with an overall significant strong correlation [r=0.90]. Testing the internal consistency revealed that coefficients of Cronbach's a were>0.80 for all domains except for items of management of DV and relationship causes of DV. Overall, the scales of the questionnaire could discriminate between physicians and nurses [P=0.001]. Attitude scores were significantly higher in nurses, whereas knowledge and causes scores were higher in physicians. Within each studied aspect, the scores of different domains in the questionnaire were positively correlated with each other significantly. The questionnaire was reliable and valid for assessing knowledge, attitude and other aspects of DV among primary care providers