Evidence of validity of the Smoking Cessation Counseling scale - Brazilian version

Objective: to evaluate the evidence of validity of the internal structure and reliability of the Brazilian version of the Smoking Cessation Counseling instrument. Method: psychometric study of confirmatory factor analysis and reliability carried out on 250 nurses in clinical practice. For the analysis of the convergent validity of the factor model, Average Variance Extracted values were calculated, and discriminant analysis was carried out using the Fornell-Larcker criterion. Reliability was examined using Cronbach's alpha coefficient and composite reliability. Results: it was necessary to exclude seven items from the Advanced Counseling domain and one item from the Basic Counseling domain in order to properly obtain the Average Variance Extracted values and the Fornell-Larcker criterion. The composite reliability ranged from 0.76 to 0.86 and the overall Cronbach`s alpha coefficient was 0.86, ranging from 0.53 to 0.84 depending on the domain assessed. The final version of the instrument was made up of 16 items divided into 4 domains. Conclusion: the Brazilian version of Smoking Cessation Counseling obtained adequate psychometric evidence of validity and reliability. Further studies are needed to refine the instrument.