Development of a Valid and Reliable Questionnaire to Identify Professional Opinion Regarding Organ Transplantation System

Abstract

Background: Currently, the Nepalese law permits organ donation by an individual who falls into the category of a "close relative" of the recipient. There is a need for expansion of the live organ donor pool beside close relatives. Different systems of organ transplantation are followed by several countries and the professional opinions that underpin these systems need to be studied.

Objective: To generate a questionnaire related to different organ transplant systems and validate it so that it can be used to collect mass professional opinions.

Methods: Item generation, item reduction, item scaling, and pretesting were used to develop a questionnaire. The final version of the questionnaire was reviewed by experts for its content validity and then was used twice for participants at a 20-day interval to calculate Cronbach's alpha for testing its internal consistency and Intra-class correlation for testing its test and retest reliability.

Results: The questionnaire was found to be valid and reliable with an overall Cronbach's alpha of 0.701. Intra-class correlation scores for each question in both test and retest were correlated.

Conclusion: A valid and reliable questionnaire was developed that can be used to collect mass professional opinions to assist policy makers to establish a better organ transplant system.

Keywords: Directed tissue donation; Organ transplantation; Reproducibility of results; Surveys and questionnaires; Tissue and organ procurement.