Development and Psychometric Validation of a Scale for Measurement of Attitudes Towards Tramadol Use

Abstract

Evidence in the literature have pointed that to date, there is no scale with satisfactory psychometric properties to measure attitudes towards tramadol use. The objective of this study was, therefore, to develop and validate a scale that would fill this vital existing gap in the measurement of attitudes towards tramadol use. The scale items (n = 28) were sourced from the literature and focus group discussions with tramadol users. Six experts and 30 long-term tramadol users were engaged for content and face validations of the items respectively. For construct validation, 192 tramadol users were engaged. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was applied to identify the underlying factor structure of the scale and Cronbach’s alpha was computed for the scale internal consistency. Four items failed to meet the item-content validity index (I-CVI) cut-off point (I-CVIs < 0.83) and were deleted leaving 24 items with the scale-content validity index (S-CVI) of 0.94. Five more items were deleted for cross-loading and low loading values (loadings < 0.50) leaving 19 items.  The EFA resulted in the extraction of three factors: perceived benefits (11 items), perceived threat (6 items) and willingness to quit (2 items) with the reliability coefficients of 0.91, 0.96 and 0.92 respectively. We named this scale Tram-MIND because it has to do with the feelings and emotions of the mind towards tramadol use. Tram-MIND can provide vital information for developing appropriate attitudinal change interventions and could as well be used for outcome evaluation of the intervention measures.