A Scale of Parental Anxiety about Pediatric Emergency Medical Care Services of Japan: Development, Reliability, Validity, Generalizability and Usefulness

Aim: The purpose of this study was to develop a scale, “parental anxiety about pediatric emergency medical care services” (PAPEMCS), and to evaluate its psychometric properties. Methods: Participants were 14,510 parents with children 6 years old or younger in Kagawa Prefecture. Using each half of the participants, exploratory factor analysis was performed to generate items and factors for the PAPEMCS, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to establish the construct validity. The generalizability of the PAPEMCS was evaluated by congruence tests and multigroup CFA. The usefulness of the PAPEMCS was established by the relationship between the PAPEMCS and non-urgent usage of pediatric emergency medical care services (PEMCS). Results: The PAPEMCS compromised 4 factors: “anxiety about quality of PEMCS”, “anxiety about PEMCS system”, “anxiety about public support”, and “anxiety about private support”. All reliability estimates (polychoric ordinal alpha coefficients, item-rest correlations), the item discrimination, 5 fit indices for CFA, the convergent validity (indicator reliabilities, composite reliabilities, average variance extracteds), and the discriminant validity fulfilled the acceptability thresholds. All generalizability estimates fulfilled the predetermined levels of acceptability (Tucker’s congruence coefficients, congruence tests, strict factorial invariance). The usefulness of the PAPEMCS was established by the higher scores of the PAPEMCS being related to non-urgent usage of PEMCS. Conclusions: The PAPEMCS demonstrated satisfactory reliability, validity, generalizability and usefulness. The PAPEMCS is useful to quantify the contents and extent of parental anxiety about PEMCS, and to clarify the mechanisms of non-urgent PEMCS usage.