JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In health professionals, negative stereotypes about older adulthood have been associated with difficulty in recognizing pathological processes and the refusal to care for older patients for assuming that communication with them will be uncomfortable and frustrating. For these reasons, the research about stereotypes in these groups has acquired a growing importance.

Objective:

The usual strategy to identify and evaluate ageist stereotypes is to use scales and questionnaires. Although multiple scales are currently used, in Latin America, the Questionnaire for the Evaluation of Negative Stereotypes Toward Older Adulthood (CENVE) is widely used, but without evidence of construct validity in our context. So, the aim has been to study the validity of the CENVE in a sample of Colombian health personnel (health sciences students and professionals), as well as its invariance according to gender and age.

Methods:

A non-probabilistic sample of 877 Colombian professionals and intern health students was obtained. To study the factor structure of the CENVE two Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were calculated, to test a single-factor and to test the three-related factor structure. The factor measurement reliability was evaluated with the Composite Reliability index and the Average Variance Extracted. The measurement invariance according to gender and age have been studied for the best model. Using a structural equation model, the relationship between age and the CENVE has been studied to obtain evidence of validity, since studies indicate that the younger the age, the greater the number of stereotypes.

Results:

The one-factor structure was confirmed. The reliability results indicate that both indices showed adequate values. There is strong measurement invariance by gender and by age groups and we found that men and young people showed more stereotypes. We have also found evidence of validity by verifying that age is inversely related to the questionnaire latent score, so the younger the participants, the higher the stereotype. These results are in agreement with those obtained by other authors.

Conclusions:

We can conclude that the questionnaire shows good psychometric properties to assess stereotypes toward older adulthood in the Colombian’s health professionals and health sciences college students. This will allow us to increase our understanding of the effect of these variables on ageism.