Vaccine-skeptical parents have been connected to the re-emergence of vaccine-preventable illnesses, although data is limited locally. The Parent Attitudes about Childhood Vaccines (PACV) questionnaire was used to identify vaccine-hesitant parents. The purpose of this study was to adapt and translate the 15-item PACV questionnaire from English into Malay, as well as to assess its validity and reliability. Parents of children aged 0–24 months were recruited at an urban government health clinic. During content validation, two items from the “Behavior” subdomain were recognised as formative scale items and were removed from exploratory factor analysis (EFA) but kept as part of demography. The questionnaire was completed by 151 parents, with a 93.3 percent response rate. Four weeks later, 25 responders were evaluated for test-retest reliability, and the intra-class correlation ranged between 0.53 and 1.00. The EFA of the 13 items revealed the possibility of two to four factor domains, although only three domains were conceptually comparable. Two of the domains were comparable to the original, while one component was discovered entirely by chance.
As a result, the verified final PACV-Malay had 12 items organised into three-factor domains. With a cumulative Cronbach alpha of 0.77, the PACV-Malay was trustworthy. To summarise, the PACV-Malay is a viable and reliable instrument for identifying vaccine-hesitant parents in Malaysia. Future research should include confirmatory factor analysis and predictive validity.
Reference: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21645515.2019.1674112
