Research Article Validation of Health Extension Workers Job Motivation Scale in Gamo-Gofa Zone, Southern Ethiopia: A Cross-Sectional Study Shikur Mohammed, 1 Marelign Tilahun, 1 Mesfin Kote, 1 Mohamedaman Mama, 1 and Dessalegn Tamiru 2 1 Department of Public Health, Arba Minch University, P.O. Box 21, Arba Minch, Ethiopia 2 Department of Population and Family Health, Jimma University, Jimma, Ethiopia Correspondence should be addressed to Shikur Mohammed; m shikur@yahoo.com Received 18 October 2014; Revised 31 January 2015; Accepted 3 February 2015 Academic Editor: Aldo Rosano Copyright © 2015 Shikur Mohammed et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Introduction. Well-trained and highly motivated community health workers are critical for delivery of community-based health care services. Understanding what motivates especially community health care providers for better community health requires the use of psychometrically reliable and valid scale. is study was conducted to validate job motivation scale in Gamo Gofa Zone, Southern Ethiopia. Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted in 150 health care posts in Gamo Gofa Zone, from February 01, 2013, to March 01, 2013. A total of 301 participants responded to questionnaires asking about sociodemographic characteristics and job motivation. Exploratory factor analysis with principal component extraction and varimax with Kaiser Normalization rotation were employed to develop scales for job motivation. Eigenvalues greater than 1 were used as criterion of extraction. Items with item factor loadings less than 0.4 and double loaded items were dropped. Alpha and exploratory factor analyses were examined to test reliability and validity of the scale. Results. During exploratory factor analysis eight factors emerged from the three dimensions of job motivation scale, namely, educational career, workload, financial incentive, supervisor encouragement, community recognition, access to infrastructure, living condition, and better achievement in work. e factor loadings of the items in each dimension ranged from 0.58 to 0.83. Crobach’s alpha of the scales ranged from 0.79 to 0.90. To check validities of the scales developed in this study, the previous studies conducted to develop job motivation scale were used. Conclusion. Although the present scale has the potential to measure the job motivation of health extension workers and it is low in cost and easy to administer and analyze, it should be field-tested at different settings. 1. Introduction Recognizing the huge gap between the need and health care services available, Ethiopia launched new health extension program (HEP) to provide health care services in accessible and equitable manner to all segments of the population with special attention to mothers and children. Moreover, the majority of the health problems in Ethiopia are due to infectious diseases, which are better managed by an approach that focuses on preventive and promotive health services [1, 2]. As a preventive health program, the HEP promotes four areas of care: disease prevention and control, family health, hygiene and environmental sanitation, and health education and communication [1]. Health extension workers (HEWs) are the cadre for the implementation of health extension program. All HEWs are women at least 18 years of age with a minimum of 10th grade education recruited from the communities in which they will work, who are trained to implement health extension packages of 16 health care activities at the kebele (village) level and must complete a one-year course of training. Upon completion of training they are assigned in pairs in kebele where they were recruited first and work directly with indi- vidual families to serve 500 households. ey are expected to spend 75 percent of their time visiting families in their Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Scholarly Research Notices Volume 2015, Article ID 250610, 5 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/250610