Abstract

Background: Professional Social Responsibility is now imperative for the practice of medicine. However, no instruments exist at present to assess their medical practice. Aim: Construct and evaluate the factorial structure and reliability of a questionnaire designed to measure socially responsible behavior in physicians. Material and Methods: Questionnaire on Medical Socially Responsible Behavior of 34 items was constructed, which was applied to 284 subjects, both physicians and medical students, resulting in a valid sample of 214 individuals, 51.4% of them male, between 23 and 67. We assessed the factorial structure, reliability, discriminative ability of the items and correlation between factors. Results: Exploratory factorial analysis, conducted using a principal factor method, identified the presence of three factors, considered 30 items. The reliability of the factors, as Cronbach's alpha, ranged from 0.73 to 0.89. Only one item showed a low correlation 0.3, and correlations among the three factors were direct and intense. Conclusions: The results suggest that the developed questionnaire presents a definite factorial structure, with factors internally consistent and correlated with each other, with adequate psychometric properties for use in research in the area.