A comparison of the validity of two instruments assessing health professional student perceptions of interprofessional education and practice

Health professional education programs increasingly incorporate interprofessional education (IPE) activities into curricula in response to evolving health policy and accreditation requirements in an effort to highlight the benefits of, and prepare students for, interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP). As such, there is a need for statistically valid instruments designed to assess baseline student perceptions regarding IPE and IPCP. Using confirmatory factor analysis, this study compared the reliability and construct validity of a revised 21-item Attitudes Toward Health Care Teams (ATHCT-R) instrument and a 10-item Student Perceptions of Interprofessional Clinical Education-Revised (SPICE-R) instrument. The instruments were concurrently administered online and completed by a total of 221 first year nursing, optometry, pharmacy, physical therapy, and health administration students. In this study, the SPICE-R exhibited better performance in terms of goodness of fit, construct validity, and reliability compared with the ATHCT-R. The SPICE-R instrument demonstrates promise as a parsimonious, valid, and reliable tool for measuring health professional students' perceptions of IPE and IPCP.