OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to validate the Individual Community Related Empowerment (ICRE) scale in alignment with the national language of Malaysia.
METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted from May to December 2019. Back-to-back translation from the English to Malay version of the ICRE scale was done. A total of 328 older persons aged 60 years old and above who attended clinics and understood Malay had been randomly selected. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), particularly Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with Varimax rotation and Kaiser Normalization, was performed in this study using IBM SPSS version 27 Amos graphic.
RESULTS: The findings revealed that the Malay version of the Individual Community Related Empowerment (ICRE-m) scale consists of five components: self-efficacy, intention, participation, motivation, and critical awareness, which collectively accounted for 92.3% of total variance. All five components demonstrated Cronbach's alpha values greater than 0.7, indicating the reliability of the selected items for field studies.
CONCLUSION: The ICRE-m scale is acceptable for field studies and valid for measuring individual-related community empowerment. Nurses and other healthcare professionals can employ this scale specifically within the Malay-speaking population, particularly in the Asian region. Future studies on community empowerment among older individuals can utilize this tool to assess community readiness for participating in community health interventions.
METHODS: This systematic review was reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. The literature search was carried out through PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus. Original articles written in English and published between 2013 and 2023 were considered. Study quality was appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Narrative synthesis was undertaken due to methodological heterogeneity in the included studies.
RESULTS: A total of 13 cross-sectional studies, two randomized controlled trials, two cohort studies, two mixed methods studies and one quasi-experiment with a control group were included. An overall low level of diabetes risk perception was reported particularly in those without apparent risk for diabetes. The 20 included studies reported widely varied measures for calculating diabetes risk perception. The influence of environmental factors on the risk perception of diabetes was highlighted.
LIMITATIONS: The use of study-specific and non-validated measures in the included studies weakens the authors' ability to compare across studies. The role of language and publication bias within this systematic review should be acknowledged as we included only English-language studies published in peer-reviewed journals. Another limitation is the exclusion of dimensions of risk perception such as optimistic bias as search terms.
CONCLUSION: The overall low risk perception of diabetes calls for urgent need of public health interventions to increase the risk perception of diabetes. In the future, researchers should ensure the validity and reliability of the measures being used. The influence of environmental factors on the diabetes risk perception indicates that diabetes preventive interventions targeting environmental factors may be effective in increasing the risk perception of diabetes.