Development of a Medication Compliance Scale in Patients with Chronic Diseases / 中国慢性病预防与控制

ABSTRACT

Objective To develop a reliable scale for evaluating medication compliance among patients with chronic diseases in China.Methods An initial item pool was generated by literature review,based on the definition of compliance generally accepted in China.The items were then subjected to item selections by using item answer distribution and other four methods,which resulted in a primary scale with 16 items.The reliability and validity of this scale was examined.Results Common factors extracted by factor analysis were well explained,there being a close correspondence between the scale construction and the theoretical construction. Convergent validity with the patients' self-ratings on medication compliance ranged from 0.55 to 0.59,and the correlation coefficient with the score of Morisky questionnaire was 0.58.The Cronbach ?,0 and ? coefficients were 0.717,0.751,0.893 respectively,and test-retest reliability was 0.95.Conclusion The newly developed scale appears reliable and may be a useful tool for measuring drug compliance among patients with chronic diseases,but there are still areas where further improvements may be needed.