Developing A scale for student's attitudes to public HEALTH

Introduction: Thanks to the developments in public health throughout history, societies have overcome important health problems. Therefore, it is important that the public health capacity of societies is at the best level. One of the most important factors forming capacity is manpower. Physicians become professionals in the public health workforce by completing residency training in public health or earning a master's/doctorate degree. There are many factors that affect career planning. Personal attitudes are amnog the factors that plkay a role in professional career choices. In this study, it was aimed to develop a scale to determine the attitudes of senior medical faculty students towards public health. Method: The sample of this methodological study consists of senior medical faculty students studying in Istanbul. A three-dimensional draft scale was prepared by reviewing the literature and taking information from the experts. Expert opinions were taken for content validity. The content validity rate and index were calculated. Explanatory factor analysis and principal component analysis were performed within the scope of construct validity and factor identification. Reliability analyzes are shown with Cronbach's alpha. Results: Opinions of 24 experts were received on the 97-question draft scale. After content validity analyzes and expert opinions, 20 items were removed from the scale. Items with item-total correlations below 0.20 and common variance values below 0.50 were not found suitable for factor analysis. Therefore, 23 items were removed from the scale. Lastly, 5 items that were considered to be overlapping items were not included in the scale. After the validity analysis, 29 items remained in the professional career and interest dimension, 15 items in the importance of public health dimension, and 5 items in the public health lectures and internship dimension. Calculated Cronbach alpha values were found to be high and very reliable. Conclusion: As a result, a valid and reliable tool has been developed that can be used to measure the attitudes of senior medical faculty students towards public health.