Italian Translation and Validation of the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) in an Undergraduate Healthcare Student Context

Abstract

Interprofessional education requires that two or more professionals learn from and with each other to allow effective collaboration and improve health outcomes. Thus far, the interprofessional collaboration of healthcare students might be assessed using the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS), which is currently not available in its Italian version. This study aimed to provide the intercultural adaptation of the RIPLS in Italian (I-RIPLS) and assess its validity and reliability. A two-phase validation study was performed in 2020, using a single-centre approach in students enrolled in the medical degree, physiotherapy, nursing, and dentistry courses at an Italian-speaking university in Albania. The first phase of the study determined the cross-cultural adaptation of the items by involving two translators who followed a forward and backward translation process. In the second phase, a sample of 414 students was enrolled. The preliminary corrected item-total correlations showed that five items did not show significant item-to-total correlations. Even if their deletion was not mandatory for generating a suitable correlation matrix for factor analysis, the advantages of keeping only items contributing to a more stable measurement with a shorter scale represented the rationale for removing items with non-significant item-to-total correlation from the correlation matrix before testing the dimensionality of the I-RIPLS with factor analysis. The answers from the first 50% of responders (n = 207) were used to determine the most plausible dimensionality of the I-RIPLS by employing an exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and the second 50% were used to cross-validate the most plausible dimensionality derived from EFA by employing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) models. The most plausible dimensionality from EFA, by acknowledging the interpretation of the scree plot, the eigenvalues greater than 1, a parallel analysis, and the previous theoretical dimensions of the tool had two factors with adequate internal consistency. The CFA confirmed the two-factor solutions and the internal consistency for each domain. The I-RIPLS has 14 items with adequate evidence of validity and reliability. Future research should revise the tool for pursuing cross-cultural multigroup measurement invariance.