Objective: The aim of this paper was to develop an appropriate scale measuring healthcare students' anxiety during the transition from school to work.
Methods: After an extensive literature review and panel discussion to prove the face validity and content validity, the initial item pool was reduced to 52 items. In a pilot study, a sample of four hundred and twenty-four healthcare students participated, and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used. Psychometric properties-construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity, goodness of fit, and reliabilities-were also analyzed.
Results: After the use of EFA, the 52 items were reduced to 31 items in four factors, with 66.70% of the total variance explained. The Cronbach's alpha values ranged between 0.91 and 0.93. The study also used CFA to validate the EFA model, and the results demonstrated that with the same thirty-one items in a 7-point Likert scale, the model was a better fit in four factors: "inexperience in professional knowledge and skills" (nine items; factor loadings: 0.642-0.867; 43.72% of the variance explained), "fear of death" (eight items; factor loadings: 0.745-0.831; 9.94% of the variance explained), "fear of being infected" (eight items; factor loadings: 0.678-0.866; 7.86% of the variance explained), and "interpersonal interactions" (six items; factor loadings: 0.704-0.913; 5.18% of the variance explained). The CFA model demonstrated a good model fit in the χ2/df ratio (1.17; p = 0.016), CFI (0.99), TFI (0.99), and RMSEA (0.02). The composite reliabilities ranged from 0.89 to 0.92, confirming the StWTA-HS scale's stability and internal consistency. The convergent validity and discriminant validity were also confirmed. The StWTA-HS scale has been proven to be a stable scale to measure healthcare students' school-to-work transition anxiety.
Keywords: confirmatory factor analysis; exploratory factor analysis; healthcare students; scale development; school-to-work transition anxiety.