Measuring the Core Competencies of Public Health Leadership (Coursework Sample)

Running Head: PUBLIC HEALTH LEADERSHIP
Measuring the Core Competencies of Public Health Leadership
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Measuring the Core Competencies of Public Health Leadership
To assure a strong public health leaders, it is critical to measure current competency in providing essential public health services and provide education and training to enhance those competencies. To this goal, the task of developing Core Competencies for public health professionals has been undertaken by the Council on Linkages between Academia and Public Health Practice (Council on Linkages, 2001). The Council on Linkages (COL) has developed a set of competencies to be used in assessing the public health workforce entitled the Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals (Council on Linkages, 2005).
The COL Core Competency set is comprised of 8 substantive areas or domains including:
• Communication
• Cultural Competency
• Policy Development and Program Planning
• Community Dimensions of Practice
• Basic Public Health Science
• Financial Planning and Management
• Analytic Skills
• Leadership and Systems Thinking
The COL competency set is mentioned specifically in the Future of the Public’s Health in the 21st Century and the related IOM report Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? (IOM, 2003) as an appropriate standard for public health workers. In any case, one could make the argument that the COL set has become the de facto tool of choice as a result of its wide spread use. At a session of the 2004 American Public Health Association meeting examples of the use of the COL competency set included 26 separate cases for projects as diverse as the development of training programs to use in developing a state health plan. A search of a database of public health training programs provides dozens of examples of programs and courses based on the COL set. The Council on Linkages core competencies are related to the 10 essential public health services (each competency has been “cross-walked” to one or more of the essential services) and are intended to be used in assessing the public health workforce (Council on Linkages, 2005).
The IOM report Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? (IOM, 2003) lists in excess of sixty different competency sets that might be relevant to various professional positions within the public health workforce. Suffice it to say the area of competency development is still an area of substantial activity at this point. The validation of competencies is an area of much less robust activity. Hence, the aim of this study is to address this measurement issue.
The levels of measurement that will be important for your study and why.
To assure credibility with key stakeholders the competencies must be validated using the
traditional tools of measurement. Since my primary aim is to investigate the measurement properties of the Core Competencies, I would like to address the issue through principal components analysis. By analyzing the underlying factor structure one can measure the degree to which each of the items is measuring what it is intended to measure and which items might need to be eliminated or revised. Thus, specific questions to be investigated in my study include:
1) Does the solution emerging from the principal components analysis coincide with the 8 domain structure of the COL competency set?
2) Are there individual items that do not appear to be good discriminators? In other words, do they exhibit factor loadings that suggest they are measuring more than one underlying construct or are not accurately measuring the domain of interest? If so, these items could be candidates for revision or elimination.
How you will ensure content validity, empirical validity, and construct validity for your study. If any of these types of validity do not apply to your plan, provide a rationale.
To date, no studies have been conducted on the construct validity of the Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals. The purpose of the present research is to address the issue of the construct validity and reliability of the Core Competency set and to provide evidence to advance the science base for assessing the public health workforce.
Assessment to ensure content validity, empirical validity, and construct validity of the Core Competency set is crucial to the development of the science base required to guide public health systems research in the future. The development process for the Core Competency set to date, provides evidence of empirical and content validity however, evidence of construct validity and reliability is still lacking. The present study would like to provide evidence for assessing the validity of the competency set as a tool for assessing public health professional competency.
How you will ensure reliability for the measurement in your study.
Ensuring reliability of a study`s measurement instrument has been characterized as an on-
going process (Streiner and Norman, 1995) and a “matter of degree” (Nunnally, 1998) that requires the use of multiple methods and multiple sources of information. Thus, I would be using multiple methods and multiple sources of information in my study.
The strengths and limitations of the measurement instrument you have selected in terms of reliability and validity.
This conceptualization held that validity was composed of three “types”: content, criterion and construct validity. Content validity addresses the degree to which an instrument adequately samples the full domain of phenomena under investigation and is often established through expert review. Criterion validity is assessed by the degree to which the results obtained with the instrument being validated correlate with results from a previously validated tool that measures the same phenomena. For example, if one were developing a new measurement instrument to assess depression, scores obtained with the new instrument would be expected to correlate with scores from a previously validated instrument know to measure depression. Under this trinitarian view, construct validity was defined as the degree to which a measurement tool was in fact measuring the construct under investigation, be that depression, intelligence or basic public health science skills.
Recent work has resulted in a more unitary model in which criterion and content validity
have become subsumed under the overarching term of construct validity. In this model evidence of criterion and content validity are seen as elements in building the case for the construct validity of a measure (Schultz, Riggs and Kottke, 1998; Moss, 1992). Moss (1995) suggests that there is now practically universal acceptance of this conceptualization and others (Adcock and Collier, 2001) have stated that the new model of validity identifies content and criterion validity as necessary but not sufficient to establish the more expansive notion of construct validity. In the unitary model the term construct validity has become almost synonymous with the term measurement validity or what some have referred to as nomological validity.
The establishment of construct validity requires the use of multiple methods, using both
empirical investigation and the testing of theoretical implications based on the phenomena under investigation. The construction of a “nomological network” (Campbell, 1990; Cronbach and Meehl, 1995) composed of evidence from multiple methods and sources provides the strongest case for the validity of a measurement instrument. This network can consist of “observables” or empirical data about the constructs that the instrument under investigation attempts to measure, hypotheses about how constructs and variables should relate to each other and the degree to which theorized relationships or patterns of relationships between constructs are in evidence.
Which scale is appropriate for you to use for your plan and why.
Factor analysis or principal components analysis can provide some of the “observable” evidence mentioned above regarding the degree to which the items comprising a measurement tool are in fact, measuring the phenomena of interest. For example, the Core Competency set has a number of items intended to measure the respondent’s perceived ability regarding Communication. Factor analysis of these items can provide statistical evidence regarding the interrelationships between the items and assess the degree to which they measure an underlying construct that could be termed communication. To the degree that items are found to cluster together regarding their hypothesized domain, construct or factorial validity can be inferred.
A justification of how you know your scale is reliable and valid. If you can't find reliability and validity for your scale, describe how you would demonstrate that the scale is reliable and valid.
Studies of the validity (Beaulieu and Scutchfield, 2002) and reliability (Beaulieu, Scutchfield and Kelly, 2003) of the National Public Health Performance Standards are examples of efforts to validate measurements used in public health system research. Beaulieu Scutchfield and Kelly (2003) assessed content validity through a survey of state and local staff that required respondents to rate each of the model standards used in the National Public Health Performance Standards tool regarding importance, achievability and completeness. The authors achieved a 45% response rate (n =33) from local health department staff and calculated descriptive statistics on the proportion of the sample that responded Yes, Partially or No to questions about the model standards regarding completeness (Does this model standard contain a complete description of this Essential Public Health Service?) and achievability (Is it...