Data associated with 'Development of the Consumer Attitudes Towards Healthcare Scale'

Data supporting construction of a scale entitled the Consumerist Attitudes in Healthcare Scale. We used a literature-informed strategy to develop the Consumerist Attitudes towards Healthcare Scale, drawing items from related scales if these items represented the construct of consumerism. We conducted a targeted literature search to identify conceptual models that describe the patient as a consumer of healthcare. We also identified existing scales and questionnaires as a supply of items for inclusion. From the identified literature, we extracted a list of attitudes, preferences, and expectations for inclusion in our initial survey. We surveyed a nationally representative US population with a 45 item questionnaire that used 5-point Likert responses to assess consumeristic attitudes. We generated a polychoric correlation matrix and did exploratory factor analysis using a principal components solution. We sent the resulting scale to additional respondents twice for repeatability testing. We then surveyed a new nationally representative population with this consumeristic attitudes scale plus 2 additional existent scales for testing of concordance and discordance. The confirmatory factor analysis on the new results was very similar to the initial survey results supporting a 3-factor, 11 item scale. The three factors might best be described as 1) feeling self-efficacious in health care interactions; 2) preferring to be the decision maker; 3) expressing confidence in knowledge about the health care system. On a five point scale (with 1 being most consumeristic), the respondents had mean score of 1.9 (SD 0.53).The scale was correlated modestly with the Medical Maximizer/Minimizer Scale (rho=0.25, p<0.0001) and was not correlated with the Attitudes toward Technology Scale (rho=0.07, p=0.17), which is what we anticipated. The Cronbach’s alpha for the full scale was 0.84. Exploratory subgroup analysis suggested that younger patients have the least consumeristic attitudes.