DEVELOPMENT OF AN ATTITUDE SCALE TO MEASURE ATTITUDES TOWARDS ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION AND DONATION OF PRESERVICE TEACHERS

Abstract

Today, there is a great discrepancy between the number of recipient patients on waiting lists for an organ transplant and the number of donated organs. Negative attitudes toward organ donation are important factors in the lack of donors. Education is an important tool to change attitudes, so it is important to determine the attitudes of teachers and pre-service teachers. The aim of this research was to develop a reliable and valid scale to evaluate pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards organ transplantation and donation (OTD). The attitude scale development process was conducted on three different pre-service teachers’ groups for the purposes of performing the exploratory factor analysis (n=208), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (n=480) and test-retest correlation (n=62) of the scale. It was established that the scale had two factor structure consisting of a total of 20 items. It was determined that the two factors determined explain 61.749% of the total variance. The CFA values confirmed the two-factor model with acceptable goodness of fit indices. The Cronbach Alpha coefficient for the total scale was calculated as .900. Test-retest reliability was calculated as .951. Finally, the results demostrated that this scale is able to measure pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to OTD use reliably. Keywords: attitude scale development, organ transplantation, organ donation, pre-service teachers.