Translation and Validation of the Malay Version of Modified Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (MVHS-M) for Assessment of Parental Vaccine Hesitancy

INTRODUCTION: Parental hesitancy towards routine childhood vaccines has been recognized as one of the public health threats. Since the uptake of child vaccination remains inconsistent, there is a need for a reliable and validated tool to measure this phenomenon. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted at government health clinics in Kelantan between April 2023 to July 2023. A permission to use the original version of Modified Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (MVHS) was obtained and translated into the Malay version (MVHS-M) based on established guidelines. Parents who have at least one child aged 7 years or less were recruited by using systematic random sampling to validate the MVHS-M. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to confirm the latent domain, while reliability was measured by composite reliability and test-retest. The data were analysed using IBM SPSS Version 26 and Mplus version 8. RESULTS: A total of 270 parents who fulfilled the study criteria were selected and completed the survey. The CFA showed a good fit index: RMSEA = 0.057 (90% CI 0.031, 0.082), CFI = 0.970, TLI = 0.957, and SRMR = 0.031. The composite reliability for the domain "lack of confidence" was 0.93 (95% CI 0.91, 0.94), while the domain "risk" showed a reliability of 0.74 (95% CI 0.69, 0.79). The test-retest reliability, as measured by the Intra-class Correlation Coefficient (ICC), was 0.77 (95% CI 0.59, 0.87), indicating good stability. CONCLUSION: MVHS-M is a valid and reliable tool that will be useful in identifying parental vaccine hesitancy in Malaysia.