517 - Development and Validation of a National Faculty Health Equity Needs Assessment Tool

As many residency programs expand teaching to address the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that residents need to dismantle structural racism and other systemic inequities, it is clear that many faculty are not prepared to teach these topics. However, there is limited literature on which to base faculty development and, to our knowledge, no curricula have been published on health equity training focused on faculty. Consequently, there is a lack of literature on what faculty need when it comes to health equity training. Thus, we created and collected validity evidence for a faculty health equity needs assessment tool.

Objective:

To (1) develop a novel survey tool to assess faculty development needs related to teaching and modeling health equity principles and (2) collect initial validity evidence for the survey’s intended use through expert reviews and cognitive interviewing.

Design/Methods:

We collaborated with a survey design consultant to iteratively develop and collect validity evidence for an original survey tool. We used Messick’s unified theory of validity to collect initial validity evidence using two sources: (1) evidence based on the content and (2) evidence based on cognitive processes. First, we collected expert reviews from six health equity experts and one additional survey-design expert to assess the survey’s content. Next, we collected validity evidence based on cognitive processes by conducting six cognitive interviews with pediatric faculty who were not included in the final survey sample. Cognitive interviewing is a qualitative method specifically designed to empirically study the way in which individuals mentally process and respond to survey questions. Cognitive interviews were performed using both scripted and ad-hoc probes for questions of interest.

Results:

The first iteration of the faculty needs assessment tool included 96 Likert-type survey items and 4 open-ended items. After several rounds of expert reviews and cognitive interviews, we made several substantive revisions to individual items and the overall survey tool, resulting in a final instrument comprised of 55 Likert-type and 4 open-ended items. Taken together, the faculty health equity needs assessment tool appears to have sufficient initially validity evidence to support its intended use as a needs assessment tool.

Conclusion(s):

To our knowledge, the faculty health equity needs assessment tool that we created is the only formally developed tool for which validity evidence exists. The tool can be used by researchers to identify pediatric faculty development needs around teaching and modeling health equity principles.