Complementary medicine: atittudes and expectations, a scale for evaluation

Abstract: The past decade has seen a dramatic rise in the popularity of so- called 'alternative medicine'. However, despite this apparent move away from orthodox medicine there has been little attempt to investigate or understand this shift. One reason for the scarcity of research was thought to be the lack of any tool which can qantitively measure a person's commitment to alternative medicine. An attempt was made to construct and validate a scale which could do this. The methodology employed involved initial feature elicitation to construct statements, then to conduct studies to allow the responses to be subjected to statistical analyses, including factor analysis and correlation measures. Using this method over a number of studies a scale was eventually reached which had 14 Statements yet retained adequate discriminative power. The scale requires further validation in clinical settings; however, hopefully it will provide a basis from which research can be planned.

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