Development of a nutrition self-efficacy scale for prospective physicians.

Diet is associated with 5 of the 10 leading causes of death in the U.S., including coronary heart disease, certain types of cancer, atherosclerosis, and type 2 diabetes. Physicians can play a pivotal role in promoting nutritional management of diabetes and other chronic diseases. Therefore, it is important that valid instruments are created so administrators can better assess the educational needs of prospective physicians, their practices, and patient outcomes. Two comparable studies, one year apart, were undertaken to create an instrument that measures nutritional competence and self-efficacy among prospective physicians. This paper: (a) describes the development of a nutrition self-efficacy scale (NSES) and (b) demonstrates reliability and validity of the NSES using Rasch modeling. It concludes with a discussion of potential contributions of this scale for assessing mastery of applied nutrition among prospective physicians.