Development of an Instrument to Assess Advocacy Intentions for School Health Education

BACKGROUND: To meet the responsibility to advocate for school health education, strategies for advocacy-related training have been developed to prepare school health education majors. However, non-health education majors, in preparation for their role as community members, have been a previously overlooked audience for such training. The PURPOSE is to present the development process of an instrument to assess intentions to advocate for school health education after exposure to an advocacy training intervention conducted with college students enrolled in personal health courses. The instrument constructs were developed based on Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). METHODS: Researchers used a comprehensive instrument design framework to develop and test the instrument items. With TPB as the guiding framework, items were selected, modified, and created for the instrument. These items were subjected to Dillman's four stages of pretesting. A confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the relationship among ordinal items in the Likert-type instrument and TPB constructs. SIGNIFICANCE: Measuring the effectiveness of advocacy training is critical in ensuring that these college students understand the importance of community advocacy as a method of supporting quality school health education. RESULTS: Fit indexes for the structural model indicated that the proposed model provided a satisfactory fit for the data. Therefore, the final instrument consists of 53-items, measuring intentions of students to engage in school health education advocacy, as a result of implementing advocacy-training. CONCLUSIONS: This study resulted in an instrument to measure the effectiveness of an advocacy-training activity for college students that produces valid and reliable scores.