One-Factor Solution for Work Practice Sub-Scale

Balance of Work Focus in Child Welfare.

Work practice and values scales for child protection

Len Dalgleish,

Results from an item analysis of the worker focus scales from the SPIRT99 project conducted in BrisbaneAustralia during 1999 to 2001.

N is about 100 child protection workers across Queensland all employed by the State Department of Families, Youth and Community Care.

Analysis strategy.

I checked the coefficient alpha for all 19 items. This showed those items with low corrected item-total correlations. Then I ran an exploratory factor analysis on the 19 items. This used PC extraction. I played with a number of solutions – with the number of factors ranging from 1 to 3. Two of the factors were a ‘values’ factor and a ‘work practice’ factor. Another factor had items in which one of the alternatives was ‘There should be minimalist intervention aimed at strengthening families and the capacity to parent.”

I went back to the structure we built into the questionnaire. I sorted the 19 items into the 9 items that were pairs of ‘values’ type statements and 10 items that were pairs of ‘work focus’ statements. It did separate analyses for these two sets of items. I used the corrected item-total correlations to find the poor items. I trimmed them both back to 5 item scales.

However, I realised that I had two responses to each item. Participants indicated which of the pair they preferred and then rated their strength of preference on a 5 point scale. I used this to construct a continuous scale for each item going from very strong preference for family preservation to very strong preference for child protection (-5 to +5). I wanted the same items in each scale that loaded on a single factor solution for both the binary preferences and the continuous scale.

The three item scale and the five item scale below did this. I report the results below.

The original research was supported by an Australian Research Council, Strategic Partnership with Industry, Research and Training Grant ARCL007G/99.

One-factor solution for Work Practice sub-scale – Three items

One-factor solution for Values sub-scale – Five items

Instructions: In the following items you will be presented with a pair of statements. We want you to choose between them. We understand that you might endorse both statements but try to choose the statement that best reflects your general work focus and beliefs. Indicate your preference by circling A or B. You will see a statement more than once, but each pairing is different. There are no right or wrong answers.

Please rate the strength of your preference on the following scale of one to five.

Balance of Work Focus in Child Welfare.Len DalgleishMay, 2010.

University of Stirling, UK

Children’s ResearchCenter, AHA, Denver, USA