The Mentoring Competency Assessment (MCA) is an example of a validated instrument for measuring mentor skills for postsecondary Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine research. The purpose of this study was to revalidate the MCA scale using a larger, more diverse population since the original MCA was validated on a small sample of predominantly senior white male faculty.

The MCA was completed by 1626 mentors from a survey data set of 1759 respondents who participated in eight or more hours of face-to-face Entering Mentoring-based training between 2010 and 2019. We conducted principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation to investigate the internal structure of the MCA and Hatcher’s criteria were applied. After a team of mentoring experts independently interpreted the PCA results and reached a consensus on the interpretations of the components, factor analysis and internal consistency reliability analysis were applied to assess the construct validity and the reliability.

While the 26-item MCA instrument was originally validated with six subscales, through the factor and reliability analyses, all the parameter estimates for each item of seven components of 24-item MCA were significant and had relatively high internal consistency; the alpha coefficient for the components ranged from 0.77 to 0.86.

Five items from the MCA have been dropped, leaving a condensed 21 item scale (MCA-21) which loads onto six competencies, and should now be used to effectively measure mentoring skills. We provide recommendations for furthering the scale development and validation of common measures.

Electronic medical records (EMR) are currently being implemented in psychiatric hospitals throughout Europe. The perceptions of health care professionals can contribute important information that may predict their acceptance of and desired mode of use for EMR, thus guiding EMR implementation.

To develop a self-administered instrument designed to assess health care professionals’ satisfaction regarding EMR in a psychiatric hospital, based only on the professional point of view, according to the psychometric standards.

The development was supervised by a steering committee and undertaken by three standard steps. Item generation was derived from 115 face-to-face interviews with health care professionals in a French, public, psychiatric hospital. The item-reduction process resulted in a 25-item questionnaire. The validation process was based on construct validity, reliability and some aspects of external validity.

The final version of the questionnaire contained 25 items that described five dimensions, leading to a global score. The factor structure accounted for 72% of the total variance. Internal consistency was satisfactory (item-internal consistency over 0.40 and Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged from 0.86 to 0.95). The scalability was satisfactory with INFIT statistics inside an acceptable range. Scores of dimensions were strongly positively correlated with visual analogue scale scores (all p < 0.001). External validity showed statistical associations between scores and age, gender, seniority in psychiatry and ward type. Participation rate was 66%.

The availability of a reliable and valid questionnaire (professionals’ satisfaction questionnaire with electronic medical records [PSQ-EMR]) concerning health care professionals’ satisfaction regarding EMR in psychiatry, exclusively generated from interviews with health care professionals, enables legitimate feedback to be incorporated into EMR implementation in order to formulate a high-quality health care.