Abstract
Many problems that arise when providing pharmacy services may contain some ethical components and the aims of this study were to develop and validate a scale that could assess difficulties of ethical issues, as well as the frequency of those occurrences in everyday practice of community pharmacists. Development and validation of the scale was conducted in three phases: (1) generating items for the initial survey instrument after qualitative analysis; (2) defining the design and format of the instrument; (3) validation of the instrument. The constructed Ethical Issue scale for community pharmacy setting has two parts containing the same 16 items for assessing the difficulty and frequency thereof. The results of the 171 completely filled out scales were analyzed (response rate 74.89 %). The Cronbach’s α value of the part of the instrument that examines difficulties of the ethical situations was 0.83 and for the part of the instrument that examined frequency of the ethical situations was 0.84. Test–retest reliability for both parts of the instrument was satisfactory with all Interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) values above 0.6, (for the part that examines severity ICC = 0.809, for the part that examines frequency ICC = 0.929). The 16-item scale, as a self assessment tool, demonstrated a high degree of content, criterion, and construct validity and test–retest reliability. The results support its use as a research tool to asses difficulty and frequency of ethical issues in community pharmacy setting. The validated scale needs to be further employed on a larger sample of pharmacists.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank all the pharmacists who participated in the initial interviews; expert panel participants and to all the community pharmacists who participated for their contribution to this study. This paper is done within the framework of a project of Ministry of Science and Environmental Protection of the Republic of Serbia (project No. 41004).
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Crnjanski, T., Krajnovic, D., Tadic, I. et al. An Ethical Issue Scale for Community Pharmacy Setting (EISP): Development and Validation. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 497–508 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9587-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9587-z