Seeking a Tool to Assess Consumer Involvement in the Pharmaceutical Area: the Case of Consumer Involvement Profile as a Popular Scale

Background: Involvement is one of the most important determinants of consumers' behaviour. Considering the special position of the pharmaceutical products in public health and peace of mind, awareness from consumer involvement toward these products is very helpful for health system policy makers. To this end, access to a valid reliable tool to evaluate this concept is of great importance. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Persian version of a popular related questionnaire, naming Consumer Involvement Profile (CIP), to be used to assess consumers' involvement regarding pharmaceutical products. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted from January 2020 to March 2021 in Hamadan, Iran. Data were gathered using the 16-item CIP questionnaire with sentences adapted for the pharmaceutical products. Content validity, internal consistency, overtime reliability based on the test-retest method, construct validity (including convergent and discriminant validity), and goodness of fit were evaluated for the questionnaire. Results: Data obtained from 357 respondents underwent analysis. Overtime reliability was confirmed by a coefficient equal to 0.836 (p-value= 0.000). Cronbach’s alpha was only lower than 0.6 for the "risk probability" dimension. Regarding the convergent validity, two items had loading factors less than 0.5, which were omitted from the modified model. All CR values were higher than the corresponding AVE values. However, for two dimensions CR was less than 0.7. Although, based on the MSV, ASV and Fornell-Larcker test, importance, risk probability and risk importance, as well as importance with pleasure showed some overlaps, the discriminant validity was confirmed by HTMT. Goodness of fit indices were completely satisfying for the both primary and modified models. Conclusion: The CIP questionnaire showed an acceptable performance to measure the consumers' involvement in pharmaceutical products. This is the first study to introduce a valid tool based on a well-known scale for measuring consumer involvement in the field of medicines. Such instruments facilitate to manufacturers and policymakers in this field to make informed decisions and promote community health.