Validating the Doctoral and Academic Writing in Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Profession Survey Questionnaire for Writing Group Interventions

ABSTRACT

Aims

Despite extensive research on doctoral education, reliable tools to measure how writers' development relates to participation in social interventions such as writing groups are lacking. To address this, we conducted a study to create and evaluate a measurement tool for assessing the impact of writing group interventions on writers' development.

Design

This methodology paper reports on the design, content validity, and evaluation of a new survey tool: the Doctoral and Academic Writing in Nursing, Midwifery, and Allied Health Professional writing questionnaire (DAWNMAHP).

Methods

We created a pool of 39 items based on empirical articles from SCOPUS, ERIC, BEI, ZETOC, CINAHL, EBHOST, and PsycINFO, our experience, and stakeholder consultations. After a content validity assessment by writing experts, we revised the pool to 44 items in five domains. Finally, we tested it on doctoral writing workshop attendees using factor analysis, Pearson correlations, and Cronbach's Alpha evaluation.

Results

Thirty-six participants completed the DAWNMAHP survey tool: 22 doctoral students, seven early-career researchers, and seven participants on a designated pre-doctoral pathway. Cronbach's Alpha evaluation demonstrated good reliability (α > 0.70) for all five factors. This sample was deemed moderately sufficient (KMO = 0.579), and the items were loaded onto the five factors with all items' factor loadings > 0.5 through principal component analysis.

Conclusion

DAWNMAHP is a novel, reliable tool that measures the impact of writing group interventions on an individual writer's development concerning time management, the writing process, identity, social domains, and relational agency.

Implications for the Profession

Conducting pre- and post-writing group intervention tests and recruiting larger sample sizes is essential to further developing DAWNMAHP. It is a rigorous tool for researching the benefits of writing group interventions. Furthermore, DAWNMAHP is an effective assessment and measurement tool, making a novel contribution to research into doctoral education.

Patient or Public Contribution

No patient or public involvement was necessary at the validation stage of the DAWNMAHP tool.