Psychometric assessment of HIV/STI sexual risk scale among MSM: A Rasch model approach

Authors

Jian Li, Virginia Commonwealth UniversityFollow
Hongjie Liu, Virginia Commonwealth UniversityFollow
Hui Liu, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention
Tiejian Feng, Shenzhen Center for Chronic Disease Control
Yumao Cai, Shenzhen Center for Chronic Disease Control

Document Type

Article

Original Publication Date

2011

Journal/Book/Conference Title

BMC Public Health

Volume

11

DOI of Original Publication

10.1186/1471-2458-11-763

Comments

Originally published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-11-763

Date of Submission

September 2014

Abstract

Background

Little research has assessed the degree of severity and ordering of different types of sexual behaviors for HIV/STI infection in a measurement scale. The purpose of this study was to apply the Rasch model on psychometric assessment of an HIV/STI sexual risk scale among men who have sex with men (MSM).

Methods

A cross-sectional study using respondent driven sampling was conducted among 351 MSM in Shenzhen, China. The Rasch model was used to examine the psychometric properties of an HIV/STI sexual risk scale including nine types of sexual behaviors.

Results

The Rasch analysis of the nine items met the unidimensionality and local independence assumption. Although the person reliability was low at 0.35, the item reliability was high at 0.99. The fit statistics provided acceptable infit and outfit values. Item difficulty invariance analysis showed that the item estimates of the risk behavior items were invariant (within error).

Conclusions

The findings suggest that the Rasch model can be utilized for measuring the level of sexual risk for HIV/STI infection as a single latent construct and for establishing the relative degree of severity of each type of sexual behavior in HIV/STI transmission and acquisition among MSM. The measurement scale provides a useful measurement tool to inform, design and evaluate behavioral interventions for HIV/STI infection among MSM.

Rights

© 2011 Li et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Is Part Of

VCU Family Medicine and Population Health Publications