Development of a scale to measure the attitude toward posthumous organ donation for transplantation in Romania
All over the world, there is still a great discrepancy between the number of people waiting for an organ transplant and the number of donated organs. In order to reduce this gap, people‟s attitudes towards posthumous organ donation for transplantation need to be properly assessed, in order to elaborate efficient interventions designed to increase the frequency of consent organ donation from deceased family members. This present article reports the multi-step development of such an attitude measure on Romanian samples. Across three successive studies, we generated a belief-type attitude instrument including statements relevant for the population under scrutiny and investigated and tested its factorial structure. The results of the third study, in which we performed a confirmatory factor analysis on the structure extracted in an exploratory manner in the second, confirm the factorial validity of the instrument. The newly developed scale assessing the attitude toward posthumous organ donation for transplantation in Romania includes four factors: altruism, lack of information, transgression of the sacrality of the donor‟s body and the relieving of the donor‟s family suffering.
organ donation, deceased donors, organ transplantation, attitude, attitudinal beliefs
Andrei Holman – Al. I. Cuza University, Iaşi, Romania, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, E-mail: andrei.holman@uaic.ro
