Development and initial reliability testing of an instrument to measure attitudes toward in-service programming among psychiatric hospital staff

An instrument to determine clinical staff's perceptions and valuations of in-service programming, the Staff Development Evaluation Questionnaire, is presented. Initial testing on sample of 55 psychiatric nursing staff in a quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design yielded alpha coefficients of .83 for both the pretest and the posttest and a test-retest coefficient of temporal stability of .81. The need for further assessment of reliability is emphasized, a process currently being undertaken.