New Survey Tool Measures How University Students Think About Organ Donation

Researchers in Mexico have developed and tested a new questionnaire designed to capture what university students know and feel about organ donation, a field where persistently low donation rates continue to limit access to life-saving transplants worldwide. The Organ Donation Scale for University Students, or ODS-US, was described in a methodological study published in BMC Public Health, and its authors report initial evidence that the instrument reliably measures the multidimensional factors thought to shape donation decisions among young adults. The work responds to a documented gap: recent systematic evidence had suggested a lack of comprehensive, psychometrically validated instruments for assessing the multidimensional determinants of organ donation among university students, thereby limiting the evaluation of health promotion interventions and public health strategies in this population.

The instrument was built in two sequential phases covering instrument development and psychometric evaluation. The development phase combined a structured literature search with a two-round Delphi process, in which experts reviewed and rated candidate items, followed by pilot testing. Content validity was strong: the overall Aiken’s V coefficient reached 0.891, indicating substantial agreement among the expert panel that the items adequately represent the construct of interest. The final instrument includes a 29-item Likert-type component alongside a knowledge subscale, allowing researchers to measure both attitudes and factual understanding of organ donation within a single multidimensional tool.

Psychometric testing was carried out on a sample of 413 undergraduate students drawn from six higher education institutions in Guerrero, Mexico. Exploratory factor analysis supported a six-factor structure that accounted for 60.3 percent of the total variance in responses, suggesting that the scale captures several distinct dimensions of donation-related cognition rather than a single attitude. Confirmatory factor analysis produced a more mixed picture: the comparative fit index of 0.973 and the Tucker-Lewis index of 0.969 met the predefined criteria for acceptable model fit, whereas the root mean square error of approximation of 0.130 and the standardized root mean square residual of 0.103 both exceeded the predefined threshold of 0.08. The authors therefore caution that the proposed factor structure requires further evaluation before stronger conclusions about structural validity can be drawn.

Reliability estimates were generally favorable. The 29-item Likert component showed high internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.892 and McDonald’s omega of 0.939, while the knowledge subscale demonstrated good reliability with a Kuder-Richardson coefficient of 0.725. Composite reliability and average variance extracted provided evidence of convergent validity, meaning that items intended to measure the same construct correlated with one another as expected. Heterotrait-monotrait ratio values supported discriminant validity, indicating that the scale’s separate dimensions are empirically distinguishable rather than overlapping redundantly.

The study’s authors position the ODS-US as a potential resource for public health research and for evaluating health promotion interventions targeting organ donation, a domain where the global organ shortage remains a major challenge. By combining attitude measurement with a knowledge component, the new scale is intended to give researchers and program evaluators a comprehensive validated option where such instruments had been lacking. The researchers emphasize that the findings represent an initial psychometric evaluation and that further validation in independent samples is needed. The mixed confirmatory fit results, in particular, mean that the six-factor structure should be treated as provisional pending replication in other student populations and settings. As an open access publication, the study makes its methods and results available to other research groups who may wish to test the instrument beyond Guerrero, Mexico, and to examine whether its measurement properties hold in samples with different demographic and cultural profiles.

Subject of Research: Psychometric validation of the Organ Donation Scale for University Students (ODS-US) in Guerrero, Mexico

Article Title: Development and initial psychometric validation of the Organ Donation Scale for University Students (ODS-US)

Article References: Dávila-Navarrete, T. A., Alarcón-Paredes, A., Maldonado-Astudillo, Y. I., Ventura-Molina, E., Cerón-Garnica, C., & Alonso-Silverio, G. A. (2026). Development and initial psychometric validation of the Organ Donation Scale for University Students (ODS-US). BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29994-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29994-3

Keywords: organ donation, psychometrics, scale validation, university students, public health, Mexico, factor analysis, health promotion, Development, initial, psychometric, validation