Turkish validity and reliability of The Health Sciences Evidence-Based Practice Questionnaire

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is an approach based on scientific evidence, used to achieve specific goals and objectives, encompassing patient expectations and expertise. In the field of physiotherapy and rehabilitation, there is a need to promote the use of EBP to improve the quality of health services. Therefore, it is crucial to assess the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs of EBP in the professional field. The purpose of this study is to adapt the Health Sciences Evidence-Based Practice (HS-EBP) Questionnaire into Turkish and examine its validity and reliability among physiotherapists in Turkey. To achieve the adaptation of the questionnaire, permission was obtained from the developers of the original questionnaire, and a contract was signed. The process involved forward translation, expert panel back-translation, pilot study, cognitive interviews, and final version stages. 268 physiotherapists with a mean age of 20.35±5.12 years, at least 6 months of clinical or academic experience in Turkey were included in the study. To test the validity in the first application, physiotherapists were provided with the Turkish version of the HS-EBP Questionnaire, along with a form including sociodemographic information and EBP usage data, Quality of Professional life (QPL), the Resistance to Change Scale (RCS), the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), and the Information Literacy Self-Efficacy Scale (ILSSS), all of which were filled out via Google Forms. A subsample of 35 physiotherapists randomly selected from the participants underwent a retest of the HS-EBP Questionnaire after two weeks to establish test-retest reliability. The internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) coefficient of the scale was found to be 0.985, and the item-total correlations ranged from 0.528 to 0.867. The correlation coefficient for the second evaluation was 0.992. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) value was 0.968, and the Bartlett test was significant (p<0.05). Confirmatory factor analysis was performed to assess the relationship between the three subscales of the HS-EBP Questionnaire, which explained 68.374% of the total variance. The fit indices (χ2/sd) were 2.331, RMSEA 0.071, SRMR 0.062, IFI 0.907, CFI 0.906, GFI 0.862, and TLI 0.917. There was a statistically significant positive relationship between the HS-EBP Questionnaire and its subscales (p<0.05). There was a positive statistically significant correlation between HS-EBP Questionnaire total score and QPL total score, a negative correlation between RCS total score, a negative correlation between MBI total score, and a positive correlation between ILSSS total score (p<0,05).In conclusion, the HS-EBP Questionnaire is a practical, valid, and reliable scale that measures the knowledge, skills, beliefs, and attitudes of physiotherapists towards EBP. We believe that this questionnaire will increase suffiency and make sense of EBP, help prevent abuse, overuse, and underuse of health services, and increase the importance of EBP in the education curriculum in training of health professionals. Furthermore, we consider it a research that will guide future EBP studies in other health professions. Keywords: Physiotherapy, Evidence-Based Practice, Health Sciences, Scale