Development Of Social Adaptation Scale For Adolescents Living With HIV

Background:Because of the incurable nature of the HIV and the particularity of its transmission route,adolescents living with HIV not only have to endure the decline of physiological function caused by the disease,but also are confronted with more social adaptation problems than those of the same age.Social adaptation problems among adolescents living with HIV lead to substance use,high risk of unsafe sex behavior,poor drug compliance and other issues,affecting the effectiveness of antiviral therapy.However,there is a lack of disease-specific social adaptation measurement tools for adolescents living with HIV in China without which it is impossible to identify their social adaptation problems during antiviral treatment and apply the following interventions.Therefore,developing a social adaptation scale for adolescents living with HIV can provide a measuring tool for the detection of social adaptation problems of adolescents living with HIV and provide a basic and practical reference for the following intervention.Objective:The study was aimed to develop a social adaptation scale for adolescents living with HIV and to test its reliability,validity and feasibility.Methods:In this study,the conceptual framework of "social adaptation of adolescents living with HIV" was constructed through literature review,and the item pool was developed based on the previous surveys,the description of relevant items in the other social adaptation scales,and self-compilation.8 experts from the relevant research field were invited to screen the items.Convenient sampling of 175 adolescents living with HIV aged from 12 to 24 years old from Beijing Ditan Hospital,Yunnan Provincial Infectious Disease and Xuzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention were used to test the final scale’s reliability and validity Convenient sampling of 67 adolescents living with HIV aged from 12 to 24 years old from Beijing Ditan Hospital,Xuzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention were included in the study to measure their social adaptation status by social adaptation of adolescents living with HIV.Results:(1)The scale was composed of 3 dimensions and 23 items,including cognition,emotion and will.(2)The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the scale was 0.856,the half-life reliability was 0.836.(3)The value of the content validity index(I-CVI)of the item level was 0.80～1.00,and the average content validity index(S-CVI)of the scale level was 0.95,and the correlation coefficient between the score of the scale and the score of subjective well-being scale was 0.197(P<0.05).Factor analysis extracted 3 common factors based on the number of fixed factors extracted,as the scale’s 3 dimensions,the cumulative explanatory variables were 51.184%.(4)The average score of social adaptation scale of 67 adolescents living with HIV was 75.33±11.14 points.Conclusion:Social adaptation scale for adolescents living with HIV has good reliability,validity and feasibility,and can be used as a tool to evaluate the social adaptation of adolescents living with HIV.