RESUMEN
Objective To develop and validate the Knowledge-Attitude-Practice Scale for Prevention of Occupational Low Back Pain for Nurses (hereinafter referred to as KAP). Methods Based on the knowledge, attitudes and practice theory, a list of 48 potential items were developed by reviewing literatures related to the prevention of occupational low back pain in nurses. The Delphi expert consultation method was used to conduct two rounds of consultation on the items, and the KAP (draft) with 31 items was formed. A total of 269 nurses in a hospital in Guangdong Province were selected as study subjects by convenience sampling method and investigated with the KAP (draft). The list was selected and its validity tested using SPSS 25.0 software. Results The authority degrees of two rounds of expert consultation were 0.919 and 0.922. All of the recovery rates of valid questionnaires were >80.0%, with the coefficients of variation ranged from 0.07 to 0.40 and 0.05 to 0.28. The Kendall's concordance coefficients were 0.198 and 0.274, respectively (all P<0.05). After item selection, five items were removed, resulting in the KAP with 28-item including three dimensions： knowledge, attitude and behavior. The scale-level content validity index/average was 0.976, and the item-level content validity index ranged from 0.833 to 1.000, as assessed by experts. The scale demonstrated 100.0% for convergent and discriminative validity of the three dimensions. The exploratory factor analysis revealed three factors with a cumulative variance contribution rate of 51.0%. Cronbach's alpha coefficients for the overall scale and knowledge, attitude, and behavior dimensions were 0.880, 0.878, 0.895, and 0.877, respectively. Split-half reliability coefficients were 0.922, 0.863, 0.852, and 0.820, respectively. Conclusion The KAP shows good reliability and validity and can be used to assess knowledge, attitude and practice levels related to occupational low back pain prevention among nurses.