Reliability and validity of public emergency preparedness assessment scale:a survey among citizens in Beijing city

Objective To evaluated the reliability and validity of the public emergency preparedness assessment scale when applied among citizens in Beijing city.Methods Using multistage random cluster sampling,we recruited 1 000 citizens in 4 districts of Beijing municipality for a survey with ‘public emergency preparedness assessment scale’.Consistency test and factor analysis were adopted to evaluate the reliability and validity of the scale.Results Of the 988 participants with eligible response,472 (47.77%)were male and 516 (52.23%)were female.The scale was of a good consistency,with the coefficients of 0.81 for Cronbach's α,0.68 for Spearman-Brown,and 0.68 for Guttman split-half.After stratified by population,the consistency coefficient and the half coefficient of the scale were still within the acceptable values and there was no significant decrease in coefficient after removal of the items.Based on factor analysis there were 5 factors in the scale,including active learning,emergency risk perception,emergency attitude,efficacy of self-management,and emergency preparedness,and the 5 factors could explain 66.12% of the total variance.The internal correlation coefficients for each of the factors were all more than 0.60 and Cronbach's α coefficient was not significantly reduced after removal of the factor items.Conclusion The public emergency preparedness assessment scale is of good reliability and validity and could be used to assess public emergency preparedness among citizens in urban Beijing.