Developing a scale measuring need for cognition among medical and healthcare students and professionals

This study developed the Need for Cognition Scale for Medical and Healthcare Students and Professionals (NFCS-MHC-SP) to address the lack of a domain-specific scale for medical and healthcare professionals in Taiwan. We carried out a pilot study with 701 participants, with 386 undergoing exploratory factor analysis and 315 undergoing confirmatory factor analysis to assess the scale’s psychometric properties. These analyses identified four factors comprising 31 items: ambition for academic and professional growth (11 items), diverse thinking in problem-solving orientation (nine items), passion for rigorous inquiry and critical analysis (six items), and intellectual curiosity for exploration (five items). These factors demonstrated adequate validity, reliability, and goodness-of-fit indices, providing empirical evidence that the NFCS-MHC-SP is a reliable and culturally grounded tool for assessing the need for cognition in medical and healthcare education and training settings.