Carl Siebert

Development and Validation of a Writing Dispositions Scale for Elementary and Middle School Students

The authors report the development and validation of the Writing Dispositions Scale (WDS), a self-report instrument for measuring affective stances toward writing. The authors collected survey data from 854 elementary and middle school students and randomly split the data to facilitate both an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The findings of the EFA demonstrated that an 11-item WDS has desirable internal and content reliability and discriminant validity. The CFA supported the item selection of the EFA and demonstrated excellent factorial validity and reliability. The analyses confirmed that writing dispositions are related to 3 affective stances: confidence, persistence, and passion toward writing.

The Caregiver Role Identity Scale: A Validation Study.

Objective: This article reports the validation of the Caregiver Role Identity Scale, designed to measure the prominence of helping professionals’identity as personal and professional caregivers. The authors developed the measure to test its application to burnout, depression, and professional impairment among social workers. Method: Data from a probability sample of 751 practicing social workers were collected in an anonymous survey about social workers’ health and work issues. The authors split the sample to conduct exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Results: The exploratory analysis demonstrated good internal consistency reliability, good content validity, and preliminary discriminant validity. The confirmatory analysis demonstrated excellent factorial validity for a revised scale, retaining reliability and demonstrating convergent validity. Caregiver role identity was related to burnout, depression, professional impairment, and not seeking help for personal problems. Conclusions: This scale may be a useful tool for early identification, prevention, and intervention strategies for impairment among social workers.

Attitudes Toward Gays and Lesbians: A Latent Class Analysis of University Students

ABSTRACT The profession of social work advocates for civil rights for gay men, lesbians, and bisexual persons. However, a number of social work students and practitioners harbor antigay bias that in prior variable-centered research has been determined to be related to race, relationship status, and age. The purpose of this research was to use latent class analysis (LCA), a person-centered statistical technique, to cluster 394 university student survey responses to the Attitudes Toward Lesbian and Gays short-form instrument. The analyses indicated three groups that can be profiled as unbiased, moderately biased, and highly biased. Analysis of variance and multinomial regression verified LCA findings that are consistent with prior research. The importance of selecting appropriate educational approaches to address antigay bias among social work students and practicing social workers is discussed, and recommendations for continued research, including a national random survey of social work students and licensed social workers, are made.

Measuring Rights-Based Perspectives: A Validation of the Human Rights Lens in Social Work Scale

Objective: This article reports the initial validation of the Human Rights Lens in Social Work (HRLSW) scale, a tool designed to measure a social worker’s ability to see individual and social problems as resulting from human rights violations. The purpose of the research was to gather evidence regarding the validity of this multidimensional measure of a new construct, i.e., human rights lens. Method: Data from a convenience sample of 1,014 licensed clinical social workers were collected by electronic survey, and the sample was split to conduct discrete exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The exploratory factor analysis was performed on half of the sample (n = 507) to establish the underlying factor structure of the construct; the other half of the sample (n = 507) underwent a confirmatory factor analysis to examine the subsample’s psychometric properties. Results: A respecified model using only one error covariance fit the data very well. All fit indices were within their critical values (χ2/df ratio = 1.5; CFI =.99; TLI = .99; RMSEA = .03; SRMR = .03). Thus, factor analysis confirms a two-factor, 11-item model for the HRLSW scale, consisting of two subscales, clients seen as experiencing rights violations, and social problems seen as rights violations. Conclusions: This scale is a useful tool for educators, researchers, and practitioners who want to practice—or promote the practice of—social work as a human rights profession.

Development of the Emergency Medical Services Role Identity Scale (EMS-RIS)

This article describes the development and validation of the theoretically grounded Emergency Medical Services Role Identity Scale (EMS-RIS), which measures four domains of EMS role identity. The EMS-RIS was developed using a mixed methods approach. Key informants informed item development and the scale was validated using a representative probability sample of EMS personnel. Factor analyses revealed a conceptually consistent, four-factor solution with sound psychometric properties as well as evidence of convergent and discriminant validities. Social workers work with EMS professionals in crisis settings and as their counselors when they are distressed. The EMS-RIS provides useful information for the assessment of and intervention with distressed EMS professionals, as well as how role identity may influence occupational stress.

The Importance of Confirmatory Validation: Short Version of the Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men Scale

Herek’s Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men-Short Version (ATLG-S) is widely used in research about anti-lesbian/gay bias (formerly called homophobia), yet the scale has not been validated with rigorous methods. This study addresses weaknesses identified in the original validation studies, specifically to verify the instrument’s factor structure in samples of students in social work and other helping professions. We performed an exploratory factor analysis to determine if the factor structure would be reproduced as Herek had hypothesized. We tested the resulting model and a variety of other possible models using confirmatory factor analysis with a different sample. In addition, we tested for evidence of internal consistency reliability, convergent construct, known groups, and predictive validity. The exploratory factor analysis supported the single factor structure but the confirmatory factor analysis did not, requiring excessive and inappropriate error term correlations to obtain acceptable model fit. Despite outdated items, the scale was reliable and otherwise empirically valid. We conclude that the ATLG-S has both conceptual and empirical problems that should be considered before use with a socially progressive sample. We suggest that the development of the ATLG and the ATLG-S is a cautionary tale illustrating the importance of a priori theoretical conceptualization of the latent construct to be measured. Further, we recommend that researchers, practitioners, and educators not assume a measure’s validity, and especially a short version of a validated longer measure, just because the measure appears frequently in the literature.