Development, reliability and validity of gestational surrogacy attitude scale

Authors: Fatemeh Rahimi Kian, Afsaneh Zandi, Reza Amani Samani, Saman Maroufizadeh, Abbas Mehran

Abstract

Background: Surrogacy is one of the most challenging infertility treatment methods engaging ethical, moral, psychological and social issues. Survey of attitudes toward surrogacy in public opinion and among infertile couples as a target group, plays an important role to disclosure all variant aspects of surrogacy and helps to meet legislation gaps and ambiguities and converts surrogacy controversial Dimensions to a normative concept that eliminates inaccurate stigma in the community, accordingly informed treatment decisions would take place. The aim of this study is to develop a standard scale for gestational surrogacy attitude surveys.

Materials and Methods: Developmentand standardization process of this scale includes gathering a rich data pool through literature review, pilot qualitative study on 15 infertile couples (N=30), expert panel and modified Delphi technique, face validity and qualitative and quantitative content validity by the means of Content Validity Ratio (CVR) and Content Validity Index (CVI) and also Reliability assessment using Cronbach’s alpha and test–retest coefficient correlation. Eventually the questionnaire as a standard Gestational surrogacy attitude scale, practically engaged in a descriptive study on 400 infertile men and women attending Royan Infertility Institute, Tehran, Iran.

Results: Final version of Gestational Surrogacy Attitude Scale with 30 items within five Subscales using five-point Likert scoring method conducted. The subscales include "Overall acceptance of surrogacy", "Surrogacy and Public attitudes: Item number", "Child born through surrogacy", "Surrogate mother" and "Intentional attitude and surrogacy future attempt". Content validity of the scale represented with value of CVR=0/73 and CVI =0/98. Reliability has confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha value that was 0.91 for the overall scale and the correlation coefficient due to test-retest responses was 0/89 respectively.

Conclusion: According to outcomes of standardization process of Gestational surrogacy attitude, the acceptable level of competency and capability of this scale in attitude surveys is significantly indicated therefore this scale seems to be most appropriate for gestational surrogacy attitude evaluations.

Keywords: Development, standardization, Reliability, Validity, gestational surrogacy, Attitude, Scale