Patients’ Perception Towards Branded and Generic Medicines in an Emerging Economy: A Scale Development and Validation Study

Abstract

The study intends to develop and validate a scale to gauge the perception of patients towards branded and generic medicines in an emerging economy like India. Items were generated through literature review and exploratory semi-structured interview with patients and physicians. In the way of establishing generic medicines in the market, patients’ acceptability is very much essential. However, with the advent of information age, the patients are now becoming more conscious and aware regarding the generic medicines, and there is an improvement in the acceptability of generic medicines. Hence, the measurement of their perception towards generic medicines becomes an important issue for various stakeholders of the medical world—physicians, government, pharmaceutical companies and chemists. However, no studies regarding the measurement of perception towards the branded and generic have been conducted to develop and validate measurement scale. The present study is an attempt towards fulfilling this gap. A total of 361 valid responses were obtained using purposive sampling. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was carried out through principal component analysis (PCA) followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to establish the validity of the proposed measurement model. The five factors extracted from EFA were named as quality (Cronbach’s alpha: 0.887), trust (Cronbach’s alpha: 0.919), sustained effectiveness (Cronbach’s alpha: 0.832), reputation (Cronbach’s alpha: 0.881) and psychological benefits (Cronbach’s alpha: 0.737). The obtained factors were found reliable and valid for measuring perception of the patients towards generic and branded medicines in emerging market settings. Convergent and discriminant validity of the scale was also established.