Development of an instrument for measuring clinicians’ power perceptions in the workplace

We report on the development of an instrument to measure clinicians’ perceptions of their personal power in the workplace in relation to resistance to computerized physician order entry (CPOE). The instrument is based on French and Raven’s six bases of social power and uses a semantic differential methodology. A measurement study was conducted to determine the reliability and validity of the survey. The survey was administered online and distributed via a URL by email to 19 physicians, nurses, and health unit coordinators from a university hospital. Acceptable reliability was achieved by removing or moving some semantic differential word pairs used to represent the six power bases (alpha range from 0.76 to 0.89). The Semantic Differential Power Perception (SDPP) survey validity was tested against an already validated instrument and found to be acceptable (correlation range from 0.51 to 0.81). The SDPP survey instrument was determined to be both reliable and valid.