Measuring Patient's Perception of the Meaning of Suffering: Instrument Reliability and Validity of the Korean Version

Kang, Kyoung Ah

Abstract

When people have experienced a personally life-threatening event, individuals try to find the meaning of suffering. In order to provide nurses with information about how meaning is individually experienced, nurses should assess the degree of suffering and the patient's perceptions of the meaning of suffering. The purpose of this study is to assess the reliability and validity of the Korean version of the MIST (the Meaning of Suffering Test) instrument originally developed by Starck (1983). The MIST consists of PART I and II. In this study, the validity and reliability of MIST I is tested except MIST II consisting of 17 open questions. The translation involved four steps: translation into Korean, checking agreement, translation into English, and arriving at a consensus. Then the Korean version of the MIST, PART I was tested with a sample of 160 patients with cancer who have experienced suffering. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient for internal consistency was .92 for the total 20 items and .91, .89, and .88 for the three dimensions in that order. As a result of the factor analysis using principal component analysis and varimax rotation, three factors with eigenvalue of more than 1.0 were extracted and these factors explained 93.6 percent of the total variance. The items clustered together in this study were almost identical with initial scale and subscales reported by Starck. The instrument for accessing patients' perceptions of the meaning of suffering was identified as a tool with a high degree of reliability and validity. In this sense, this tool can be effectively utilized for assessment in caring for patients with cancer.