A Study of Scale Development to Evaluate Indıvıdual Preparedness to Floods (Kassala, Sudan)

Abstract

The study aimed to provide scale tools for measuring individual preparedness for measuring individual’s knowledge and behavior regarding flood preparedness in Kassala, Sudan. Item development was conducted by reviewing the literature and considering the opinions of the target population. Six experts agreed on the item pool and confirmed its content validity with a content validity index ≥0.75 for all the items. This process resulted in dividing of the item pool into two draft scales: knowledge and behavior. Study participants were 413 household key persons from seven neighborhoods affected by the 2018 floods in Kassala city in Sudan. Analysis of the collected data was carried out using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software for Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) construct validity, Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency, test retest reliability analysis, and item analysis. In addition LISREL 7.8 program was used for Confirmatory Factor analysis construct validity and Monte Carlo application for Pararel to analyze factor number in construct validity. Experts confirmed the content validity of the scales. EFA revealed a construct of two factors in Knowlege scale and construct of three factors for the behavior scale. Parallel analysis confirmed the number of factors. Items loaded on their factors by > 0.3. CFA also revealed acceptable significant loadings of the items of the two scales and acceptable measures of goodness of fit. Cronbach’s alpha, composite reliability indices for all factors were ≥ 0.7. The test–retest reliability coefficients were 0.75 and 0.63 for the knowledge and behaviour scales respectively. Item analysis showed acceptable corrected total item correlations and Cronbach’s alpha if the item was deleted for all the items. Differences between means scores of the highest and lowest score groups for all the factors were significant which indicate good power of discrimation of the items.The findings support the hypothesis that the two scales are instruments that produce valid and reliable measures that can be used for measuring individual’s knowledge and behavior regarding flood preparedness in Kassala, Sudan.