Soheila Sedaghat; Abbas Ebadi; Shahnaz Rostami; Malek Fereidooni-Moghadam
Volume 21, Issue 1 , 2019, Pages 1-11
Abstract
Background: Open-heart surgery is a stressful, life-threatening experience inducing fear and anxiety in many patients and theirfamilies.Objectives: The present study was conducted to design an inventory assessing the stressors in open-heart surgery patients andevaluate its psychometric properties.Methods: ...
Read More
Background: Open-heart surgery is a stressful, life-threatening experience inducing fear and anxiety in many patients and theirfamilies.Objectives: The present study was conducted to design an inventory assessing the stressors in open-heart surgery patients andevaluate its psychometric properties.Methods: This study was accomplished in two phases. The first phase involved a qualitative study during which in-depth interviewswere carried out with 21 therapists and patients with a history of heart surgery. In addition, the primary items of the inventory wereextracted by reviewing the literature and available questionnaires through a qualitative approach. In the second phase, the face,content, and construct validities of the inventory were investigated using the exploratory factor analysis with 360 participants. Inaddition, the reliability of the developed instrument was examined using Cronbach’s alpha and intraclass correlation coefficient(ICC).Results: Based on the findings obtained in the first phase, a pool of items was prepared. The findings of the exploratory factoranalysis revealed a five-factor structure that explained 50.45% of the structural variance with a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value of 0.921 (P< 0.001). The first (12 items), second (13 items), third (seven items), fourth (eight items), and fifth (10 items) factors were namedas “stressors in the intensive care unit”, “stressors related to the fear of uncertain future”, “internal stressors”, “stressors related totreatment team and facilities”, and “preoperative stressors”, respectively. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the final version of theinventory, entailing 50 items, was obtained as 0.87. In addition, the ICC between the test and retest scores was estimated at 0.94.Conclusions: Given the fact that the meaning, concept, and factors associated with any phenomenon are influenced by sociocultural context and they vary from country to country, it is necessary to use a questionnaire designed based on the experiences andconcepts expressed by the individuals living in the same context. According to the findings, the developed 50-item Cardiac SurgeryStressor Inventory is a simple, valid, and reliable tool for the measurement of stressors in open-heart surgery patients.