| Measuring the competency of the public health workforce is critical to assessing and improving the functioning of the public health system. The Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals, as promulgated by the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health (COL), have been in development for over 10 years and includes items in the following eight domains: Communication, Cultural Competency, Policy Development and Program Planning, Community Dimensions of Practice, Basic Public Health Science, Financial Planning and Management, Analytic Skills, Leadership and Systems Thinking. The Competencies were adopted for use in 2001 and were scheduled for review in 2004 although that review has been postponed. Validation of the competencies has to date been limited to face and content validity. The purpose of this study is to assess the construct validity and reliability of the Core Competency set to contribute to the review process. Data gathered from the local public health workforce in Missouri was utilized to explore the validity of the competencies. Principal components analysis (PCA), with varimax rotation; correlation and reliability analysis; and known-groups comparisons were utilized. Interpretation of the resulting rotated component matrix from the PCA suggested omitting six items; moving one of the Policy Development items to the Analytical Skills factor; moving five of the Communication items to the Community Practice factor to arrive at a 65 item final solution with eight extracted factors that correspond with the eight COL domains. Analysis of inter-factor correlations revealed lower correlations between the factors in most cases after item reduction suggesting better discriminatory power. Reliability analysis on the reduced set of items revealed high alpha coefficients with six of the seven scales greater than .90. Additional evidence of construct validity was provided by known-groups comparisons that effectively discriminated between respondents known to differ on type of job, educational history and practice experience. The results provide substantial support for the validity of the core competencies while suggesting some revisions to improve the measurement properties and shorten the competency set. The results of this study suggest the Core Competencies are a valid tool for assessing the competency of professionals in the public health workforce. |
