Document Type
Article
Original Publication Date
2014
Journal/Book/Conference Title
PLOS ONE
Volume
9
DOI of Original Publication
10.1371/journal.pone.0092855
Date of Submission
November 2014
Abstract
Courtesy stigma is the stigmatization a person perceives or experiences due to their association with a stigmatized individual or group. Most HIV-related stigma scales have been developed for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs), but not for their HIV-uninfected family members. To date, few measurement scales have been designed to measure the degree of stigma among both PLWHAs and their HIV-uninfected family members at the family level. We developed a set of courtesy stigma scales and estimated their reliability and validity from 256 PLWHAs and 256 of their HIV-uninfected family members. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed in two independent samples: a development sample (N = 216) and a validation sample (N = 296), respectively. Two factors (“public stigma” and “self-perceived stigma”) had high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha coefficient between 0.83–0.90) and good construct validity (standardized factor loading range: 0.37–0.95) in both samples. These findings document that the newly developed brief instrument is a psychometrically sound measure of HIV-related stigma among both PLWHAs and their HIV-uninfected family members.
Rights
Copyright: © 2014 Liu et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Is Part Of
VCU Social and Behavioral Health Publications
Comments
Originally Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0092855