The BETA® nursing measure: Calibrating construct validity with Rasch analyses
Abstract
Background: The BETA nursing measure has been introduced as a tool to routinely measure and monitor the outcomes of patients' activities of daily living in a restorative nursing care context.
Objectives: To investigate the BETA's construct validity using the Rasch model with specific reference to the BETA's potential to be used as an interval scale providing metric or interval data.
Method: A quantitative analytical design was followed using Rasch analyses whereby BETA raw data was collected from patients (n = 4235) receiving nursing care in 28 South African sub-acute and non-acute nursing facilities. The data was prepared for Rasch analyses and imported into WINSTEP® Software version 3.70.1.1 (2010). Final results were shown by means of figures and graphs.
Results: A successful outcome was achieved by dividing the BETA into four subscales. In this process one of the original BETA items was omitted and seven other items required collapsing of their categories before the four subscales achieved a satisfactory fit to the Rasch model.
Conclusion: The four BETA subscales achieved “very well” to “excellent” levels of fit to the Rasch model. This finding thus creates an opportunity to convert the BETA's Likert qualities into an interval measure to calculate change in patients' activities of daily living metrically as a direct result of effective restorative nursing.
Keywords: Beta, Nursing, Routine, Measure, Validity, Rasch, Activities of daily living, Restorative nursing, Rehabilitation
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publication rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Note: If you need to comply with your funding body policy, you can apply for the CC BY license after your manuscript is accepted for publication.
