Abstract

Health care providers have been shown to stigmatize mental disorders, which has serious consequences in the care, treatment and recovery of people. The instruments that have been developed to assess stigma in this population are few in number; some do not specifically focus on health workers, are aimed at a reduced range of professionals, and lack robust psychometric analyses. The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate the psychometric properties of an instrument meant to assess the stigmatizing attitudes of health care providers toward people with mental illnesses. An instrumental design with two independent convenience samples of health care providers who worked in primary and secondary health care centers was used. The first sample (n = 272) was used for exploratory factor analysis, and the second sample (n = 419) was used for confirmatory analysis. Each subject received the studied scale, a sociodemographic background survey and the Social Distance Scale (SD), which were all used for the concurrent validity analysis. To evaluate concurrent validity, the Pearson correlation index was used, while internal consistency was evaluated via Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's total omega coefficient. The final instrument includes 2 dimensions: stigmatizing beliefs (12 items) and infantilization and relational distance (6 items). Reliability indexes (Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's total omega) are between 0.73 and 0.86, respectively. Moreover, concurrent validity present moderated and significant correlations ranging from r(p) = 0.28 (p .001) to r(p) = 0.45 (p .001). The instrument has a robust factor structure and suitable levels of internal consistency and concurrent validity, which support its use in studying the attitudes of health care providers.