Professional Belonging Scale for Occupational Therapy Students: Development and Preliminary Validity and Internal Consistency Reliability.

Importance: Belonging is a dynamic contextual construct valued within occupational therapy and connected with students' academic success and career transitions. Although belonging has been measured in higher education, there is no specific tool to measure it in occupational therapy education.

Objective: To create the Professional Belonging Scale for Occupational Therapy Students (PBSOTS) and assess its validity and internal consistency reliability for measuring belonging among occupational therapy and occupational therapy assistant students.

Design: Scale development and preliminary psychometric study.

Setting: Academic programs.

Participants: The study took place in three phases from 2022 to 2023. Phases 1 and 2 involved occupational therapy experts in diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and assessment. Phase 3 included 162 students from accredited occupational therapy education programs in the United States.

Outcomes and measures: Scale items were developed on the basis of the literature, expert interviews, and a student focus group and were revised based on calculated content validity index ratings (cutoff = .78) and expert feedback. Next, student data were analyzed for an exploratory factor analysis and to determine internal consistency reliability.

Results: Of an initial 24 items, 5 were removed, 5 were revised, and 1 was added, resulting in a 20-item scale with an α value of .92. Four factors had eigenvalues greater than Kaiser's criteria of 1 and explained 61.13% of the variance.

Conclusions and relevance: On the basis of preliminary validity and internal consistency reliability testing, the authors suggest further developing and researching the PBSOTS. Plain-Language Summary: Belonging is valued within occupational therapy and is connected to students' academic success and career transitions. However, there is no specific tool to measure belonging in occupational therapy education. This study used the Professional Belonging Scale for Occupational Therapy Students (PBSOTS), a self-assessment that was created by the authors to measure students' sense of belonging in occupational therapy education programs. The authors recommend further developing and researching the PBSOTS so that the self-assessment can be used to inform occupational therapy education programs about students' sense of belonging.