Objective: The Obstetric Nursing Self-Efficacy (ONSE) instrument was developed to measure perception of self-efficacy related to the ability to provide safe obstetric nursing care among nursing students after the completion of an obstetric clinical rotation.  The purpose of this poster is to report promising preliminary findings related to the reliability of the ONSE instrument and encourage psychometric testing of the instrument in other populations.

Design:  Pretesting of the instrument established preliminary reliability and validity prior to deployment in the main study.   The instrument was administered to students before and after a 45 hour obstetric clinical rotation to measure perception of self-efficacy. 

Setting: The study was completed at a large, southern, public university. 

Patients/Participants: Junior level nursing students who were enrolled in an obstetric theory and clinical course completed the instrument.

Methods: The ONSE is an 18 item scale designed to measure perceived self-efficacy in providing safe obstetric nursing care.  Bandura’s social-cognitive theory was used as the theoretical framework to guide instrument design and content validity was subject to multiple rounds of expert review.   Convenience samples for Pretest 1 (N=20) and Pretest 2 (N=46) were used; the main study was a randomized cluster design (N=110) to compare differences in learning outcomes between students who completed a standard clinical and those who completed a simulation-enhanced clinical rotation.

Results: At the end of 45 hours of obstetric clinical, students completed the ONSE Scale (Pretest 1, N=20), split-half reliability scores were calculated at .85 and .96.  In Pretest 2, the ONSE was administered pre and post obstetric simulated clinical experience (N =46) alpha=.92; validity for the instrument was assumed as self-efficacy scores improved after exposure to simulation.   For the main study, alphas of .96 for the pretest and .93 for the posttest were obtained for the whole group.  Although no between group differences (simulation-enhanced versus standard clinical) were detected,  self-efficacy scores improved for both groups.

Conclusion/Implications for nursing practice:  The ONSE instrument has demonstrated good initial reliability and is promising as a valid instrument to measure self-efficacy in obstetric nursing care.  Because the ONSE is designed to detect behaviors related to safe and effective care in obstetric nursing, it may be well suited as a measure to detect perception of self-efficacy in new nurses prior to and after orientation to the obstetric clinical unit. Further testing in this population is needed to establish its usefulness for this group. 

Keywords: reliability and validity, instrument development, self-efficacy scale