Development and Validation of a Clinical Decision- Making Scale for Medical Students

patient's personality, values, wishes, knowledge and understanding capacity, competencies, and costs, legal and political situations, and society's perspective also affect this process (4).It is effective on decision-making personality characteristics such as the physician's selfperception, psychological state, personality structure such as emotional, shy, and excited (5), and the physician's self-confidence, autonomy, professionalism, creativity, critical and analytical thinking, problem-solving ability, and ethical values (6).Although there are many factors affecting this process, when clinical decision-making is done appropriately, the quality of patient care increases, medical errors decrease, costs decrease because resources are used effectively, and patient satisfaction increases (7). Abs tractAim: No scale has been found in the literature that allows for determining the clinical decision-making level of medical school students in Turkey.We aimed to develop a valid and reliable scale to determine the clinical decision-making levels of medical students.Methods: This descriptive study was conducted between October and November 2021.Interviews were conducted with 12 clinician faculty members through semi-structured interview forms created by considering expert opinions, and an item pool was created through content analysis with support from the literature.The item pool was piloted with 20 medical students, and their feedback was used to revise the scale items.The final version of the scale was administered to 332 fourth, fifth, and sixth-grade medical students undergoing clinical training.Data were analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, reliability analysis, and descriptive statistics. Results:The results of the explanatory factor analysis indicated that the scale had 27 items and a three-factor structure, which explained 67,905% of the total variance.The three factors were identified as "1-defining the problem and determining its causes", "2-evaluating alternatives", and "3-individual and institutional factors".Confirmatory factor analysis results confirmed the three-factor model, and fit indices indicated a good fit between the model and data.The reliability analysis showed that the scale had high internal consistency, with a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.94. Conclusion:The study suggests that the Clinical Decision-Making Scale is a valid and reliable tool for assessing medical students' clinical decision-making competence in Turkey.