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Psychometric properties of a modified cultural awareness scale for use in higher education within the health and social care fields
journal contribution
posted on 2020-12-21, 00:04 authored by C Kumlien, Melanie BishMelanie Bish, EA Chan, L Rew, PS Chan, D Leung, E Carlson© 2020, The Author(s). Background: Cultural awareness and cultural competence have become important skills in higher education as populations continue to grow in diversity around the world. However, currently, there are few instruments designed to assess student awareness of the aspects of culture, and the existing instruments need further development and testing for use with different target populations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to test the psychometric properties of a modified version of the Cultural Awareness Scale (CAS) for use in higher education within the health and social care fields. Methods: A modified version of the CAS was developed, which was tested psychometrically using cross-sectional data. In total, 191 undergraduate students from different health and social care undergraduate programs in Sweden and Hong Kong responded to a call to test the modified instrument. Results: The results showed that the modified CAS is a four-factor measure of cultural awareness and possesses satisfactory internal consistency. Results also support the use of the modified CAS as a generic tool to measure cultural awareness among students in higher education within the health and social care fields. Conclusion: The modified CAS showed satisfactory psychometric properties and can be recommended as a generic tool to measure cultural awareness among students in higher education within the health and social care fields. However, further psychometric testing on the effectiveness of the modified CAS as a tool to evaluate the efficacy of cultural awareness interventions is required.
Funding
The project was funded by a collaborative research grant from the Faulty of Health and Society, Malmö University and the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences Hong Kong Polytechnic University, but the authors had full autonomy over the study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation as well as the contents of the final manuscript. Open Access funding provided by Malmö University.
History
School
- La Trobe Rural Health School