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. 2014 Mar 21;9(3):e92855.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0092855. eCollection 2014.

Measuring HIV stigma at the family level: psychometric assessment of the Chinese Courtesy Stigma Scales (CCSSs)

Hongjie Liu  1 , Yongfang Xu  2 , Yehuan Sun  3 , Levent Dumenci  4
Affiliations

Measuring HIV stigma at the family level: psychometric assessment of the Chinese Courtesy Stigma Scales (CCSSs)

Hongjie Liu et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Courtesy stigma is the stigmatization a person perceives or experiences due to their association with a stigmatized individual or group. Most HIV-related stigma scales have been developed for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs), but not for their HIV-uninfected family members. To date, few measurement scales have been designed to measure the degree of stigma among both PLWHAs and their HIV-uninfected family members at the family level. We developed a set of courtesy stigma scales and estimated their reliability and validity from 256 PLWHAs and 256 of their HIV-uninfected family members. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed in two independent samples: a development sample (N = 216) and a validation sample (N = 296), respectively. Two factors ("public stigma" and "self-perceived stigma") had high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha coefficient between 0.83-0.90) and good construct validity (standardized factor loading range: 0.37-0.95) in both samples. These findings document that the newly developed brief instrument is a psychometrically sound measure of HIV-related stigma among both PLWHAs and their HIV-uninfected family members.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Scree test for eigenvalues in the development sample.
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