Developing and validating a scale to measure the effectiveness of school physical education policy dissemination in a multi-level educational setting

Physical education policy dissemination can help to achieve important public health goals, but is often under-prioritized and lacking among students in schools and lacks a measurement tool to evaluate dissemination effectiveness. This study aimed to develop and assess the reliability and validity of the Dissemination Effectiveness of School Physical Education Policy (DE-SPEP) scale. Seven experts were asked to test the content validity of the DE-SPEP scale. For item analysis and reliability testing, the 31-item DE-SPEP scale was administered to a sample of 452 students. Participants were students from primary school, secondary school and university. The revised scale was administered to a sample of 1018 students, and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) was used to test for construct validity across the three-stage schools. After conducting item analysis and exploratory factor analysis (EFA), a total of 28 items, collectively accounting for 73.36% of the variance, were retained for use in the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A second-order factor analysis confirmed the validity of the DE-SPEP scale. Applying MGCFA, all fit indices changed by <0.01, indicating a good fit of the model to the data. The DE-SPEP scale is a new instrument to measure the effectiveness of disseminating school physical education policies, demonstrating good reliability and validity.