Domestic violence on children: development and validation of an instrument to evaluate knowledge of health professionals.

OBJECTIVE: to develop and validate an instrument to evaluate the knowledge of health professionals about domestic violence on children.

METHOD: this was a study conducted with 194 physicians, nurses and dentists. A literature review was performed for preparation of the items and identification of the dimensions. Apparent and content validation was performed using analysis of three experts and 27 professors of the pediatric health discipline. For construct validation, Cronbach's alpha was used, and the Kappa test was applied to verify reproducibility. The criterion validation was conducted using the Student's t-test.

RESULTS: the final instrument included 56 items; the Cronbach alpha was 0.734, the Kappa test showed a correlation greater than 0.6 for most items, and the Student t-test showed a statistically significant value to the level of 5% for the two selected variables: years of education and using the Family Health Strategy.

CONCLUSION: the instrument is valid and can be used as a promising tool to develop or direct actions in public health and evaluate knowledge about domestic violence on children.