A reliable and valid asthma general knowledge questionnaire useful in the training of asthma educators

Using the responses of 115 adults attending an asthma educator training cou rse, the Asthma General Knowledge Questionnaire for Adults (AGKQA) was foun d to be an acceptably valid and reliable measure for assessing knowledge re lated to the management of asthma by adults. Content and face validity: exp ert assessors considered the AGKQA to be a relevant and plausible test of t he asthma general knowledge content of the programme. Criterion-related val idity: the pretraining scores of educators were significantly higher (P < 0 .001) than those of adults with no experience of asthma; total scores for t he AGKQA and an asthma knowledge questionnaire developed for parents of chi ldren with asthma correlated strongly, 0.72. Test-retest reproducibility: t he Spearman rank correlation for the test-retest score was 0.72 (P < 0.02), kappas for concordance of item responses were moderate to very good for tw o thirds of the items. Internal consistency for the total scale was also ac ceptable, KR20 0.66. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights rese rved.