The development of a brief version of the Nurse's Observation Scale for inpatient Evaluation (NOSiE-30)

Psychiatric hospitals typically do not use reliable and valid clinical instruments when recording behavioral observations. This could be attributable to these instruments being perceived as too complicated and time consuming to routinely administer. The goal of the present study was to examine if a briefer version of the 30 item Nurses' Observation for Inpatient Evaluation (NOSIE); could be developed without compromising the reliability and the factorial validity of the scale. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed with a combined sample of 67 persons (with 4,973 total numbers of observations) from two settings, by randomly assigning participant observations to either phase one (full-scale model, 30-item NOSIE) or to phase two (reduced-scale model, 12-item NOSIE). The results indicated that the reduced 12-item model with the correlated latent structures appears to be the best representation of the observed data. The potential clinical usefulness of a reduced item model of the NOSIE is discussed in light of these results.