| Sumario: | Power, capacity of a group to attain goals, has not been empirically developed with nursing literature. The purpose of this study was the development, and psychometric testing, of the Sieloff-King Assessment of Department Power (SKADP), an instrument designed to assess nursing's power within a hospital. This forty-item instrument asks a chief nurse executive's (CNE) perception of nursing power: (1) nursing department's control of the effects of environmental forces, (2) department's position within a hospital, (3) role within a hospital, (4) resources available, (5) the department's goals, and (6) a chief nurse executive's power ability. Each item was formatted with a five-point Likert scale (strongly agree to strongly disagree). Content validity of the instrument was estimated by ten experts rating 125 items. The eighty-eight (88) item pilot study instrument's content validity index (CVI) was 87.4%. The forty item (40) final study instrument's CVI was 80.6%. A concurrent naturalistic research design utilized a stratified random sampling process to select a sample of 617 chief nurse executives from six Midwestern states. Each CNE was asked to complete the research instrument, a criterion and a demographic questionnaire. Four hundred sixty (460) subjects completed the research materials (74.5% response rate). Reliability of the instrument, and related subscales, were estimated using Cronbach's alpha. The instrument's alpha was 0.91, with the revised subscales alphas ranging from 0.45 to 0.83. Subscales with alphas lower than 0.70 had fewer than four items per subscale. Construct validity of the instrument was estimated through concurrent criterion-related validity and factor analysis. Correlations of the SKADP and the criterion were 0.33 and 0.49 (p = 0.1), providing initial support of the instrument's construct validity. A principal components factor analysis, with a varimax rotation, extracted eight factors, leading to a reconfiguration of the instrument items. Findings support initial reliability and validity of the SKADP. Further instrument revision is suggested with additional estimation of the revised instrument's reliability and validity. Findings also provide direction for nursing administration education and practice.
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