Development of the Children Precontemplator Smoking Prevention Strategies Scale

Chen, Huey-Shys

Wednesday, 24 July 2013: 4:10 PM

Huey-Shys Chen, PhD, RN, MCHES, FAAN
Department of Health Promotion, Outcomes, Systems, and Policy, College of Nursing, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH
Melanie Percy, PhD, RN, FAAN
School of Nursing, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, NJ

Learning Objective 1: describe the process of an instrument development

Learning Objective 2: learn reliability of the Children Precontemplator Smoking Prevention Strategies Scale

Purpose:

The purpose of this study was aimed to develop an instrument to measure smoking prevention strategies with African American children at precontemplation stage of smoking initiation.

Methods:

A convenient sample of 30 African American children aged 8-11, who had not smoked in their life time and had no intention of smoking in the future was recruited from an urban low-income community. A total of seven focus groups were conducted at one boys and girls club in New Jersey. Children were asked to talked about their experiences, which help them stay away from smoking and to share effective methods they used to stay away from smoking. Content analysis of the transcripts was used to identify and organize themes, which were used to develop the content of the Children Precontemplator Smoking Prevention Strategies Scale (CPSPSS), then the CPSPSS was pilot tested with 16 children. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to assess reliability of the CPSPSS.

Results:

A group of 16 African American children were asked to specify which items they had difficulty in understanding or had questions about. All students reported that they were able to understand the meaning of each item. Study results showed that most children were unable to differentiate between 6, 5, and 4-point scale but didn’t have difficulty to place their point of view on 3- point scale. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the CPSPSS was 0.77.

Conclusion:

Research findings indicated that the CPSPSS with a total of 20 items, 3-point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 from “never” to 3 for “always” was appropriate to be used with African American children who are at precotemplation stage of smoking initiation and also suggested that it had acceptable face validity and reliability. The CPSPSS may contribute to the development of effective community-based smoking prevention intervention for school-aged African American children.

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