Measuring Moral Courage for Interns and Residents: Scale Development and Initial Psychometrics

William Martínez · Sigall K. Bell · Jason M. Etchegaray · Lisa Soleymani Lehmann

42 citations0/0 files storedAcademic Medicine

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies Innovations in Medical Education Ethics in medical practice

Abstract

PURPOSE: To develop a practical and psychometrically sound set of survey items that measures moral courage for physicians in the context of patient care. METHOD: In 2013, the 731 internal medicine and surgical interns and residents from two northeastern U.S. academic medical centers were invited to anonymously complete a survey about moral courage, empathy, and speaking up about patient safety breaches. RESULTS: Of the eligible participants, 352 (48%) responded. Principal components analysis of the moral courage items demonstrated a single, meaningful, nine-item factor labeled the Moral Courage Scale for Physicians (MCSP). All item-total score correlations were significant (P < .001) and ranged from 0.57 to 0.76. The Cronbach alpha for the MCSP was 0.90. Consistent with expectations based on theory, MCSP scores were negatively associated with being an intern versus resident (B = -4.17, P < .001), suggesting discriminant validity. MCSP scores were positively associated with respondents' Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy perspective-taking score (B = 0.53, P < .001), a construct conceptually relevant to moral courage, suggesting convergent validity. Finally, MCSP scores were positively correlated with self-reported speaking up about patient safety breaches (r = 0.19, P = .008), an action that involves moral courage, suggesting concurrent validity. CONCLUSIONS: The authors provided initial evidence for the reliability and validity of a measure of moral courage for physicians. The MCSP may help researchers and educators to tangibly measure physician moral courage as a concept, and track progress on a set of desired behaviors in response to curricular interventions.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

References

1982Development of reliable and valid short forms of the marlowe-crowne social desirability scale 2001Physician response to surveys A review of the literature 1985Factors Defined by Negatively Keyed Items: The Result of Careless Respondents?2004Business Ethics and Religion: Religiosity as a Predictor of Ethical Awareness Among Students 2011Relationships between Authentic Leadership, Moral Courage, and Ethical and Pro-Social Behaviors 1981Controlling Acquiescence Response Bias by Item Reversals: The Effect on Questionnaire Validity 2009Facing Ethical Challenges in the Workplace: Conceptualizing and Measuring Professional Moral Courage 2007Moral courage in the workplace: moving to and from the desire and decision to act

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.