Development and psychometric appraisal of Head Nurse Research Leadership Scale.

Aim: To develop a Head Nurse Research Leadership Scale and evaluate its reliability and validity.

Design: A psychometric instrument validation study was conducted in two phases.

Methods: The item tool was generated based on a literature review, semi-structured interview and brainstorming. Twenty experts validated the content of the initial version for two rounds. Thirty-nine clinical nurses conducted the HNRLS-v3 to test the readability of the items in pilot study I. Items were screened based on the critical ratio, correlation coefficient analysis, Cronbach's α coefficient and factor analysis using the data collected from 265 nurses in pilot study II. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in six hospitals to evaluate the reliability and validity between 4 January 2022 and 15 January 2022. Three hundred and sixteen nurses participated in this survey, and 60 completed the questionnaire to validate the test-retest reliability between 1 February and 6 February.

Results: A 15-item Head Nurse Research Leadership Scale based on 5 dimensions was developed, and the content validity was satisfied. The 15 items accounted for 77.9% of the variance. Confirmatory factor analysis showed acceptable convergent validity and discriminant validity. The Cronbach's α coefficient, split-half reliability and test-retest reliability of the scale were 0.966, 0.9633 and 0.927, respectively.