714 AIDS PATIENT CARE and STDs Volume 18, Number 12, 2004 © Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. Attitudes Toward HIV Health Care Providers Scale: Development and Validation JAMIE S. BODENLOS, M.A., 1 KAREN B. GROTHE, M.A., 1 KATIE KENDRA, B.S., 1 DORI WHITEHEAD, B.S., 1 AMY L. COPELAND, Ph.D., 1 and PHILLIP J. BRANTLEY, Ph.D. 1,2 ABSTRACT Patient attitudes toward their health care providers can play an important role in determin- ing health behavior change. The frequency of contact with health care professionals and dis- ease stigma makes assessing patients’ perception of this relationship of particular interest in an HIV medical population. While past general satisfaction and attitude tools have been used to assess this construct, there is a need for an assessment tool specific to patient attitudes in an HIV setting. This study was designed to validate the Attitudes toward HIV Health Care Provider scale (AHHCP) in an HIV medical population. Principal components analysis of the AHHCP yielded a two-factor structure accounting for 53.3% of the total variance in attitudes toward health care providers. The two factors represented items concerning Professionalism and Emotional Support. The AHHCP was found to have good internal consistency (0.92) and convergent validity with a measure of patient satisfaction (r  0.59). The results of the pres- ent study suggest that the AHHCP is a reliable and valid instrument for use in assessing pa- tient attitudes toward their health care providers. INTRODUCTION A CCORDING TO THE MOST RECENT STATISTICS, more than 40 million people in the world are living with HIV/AIDS. Approximately 37.5 million of these individuals are adults and 2.5 million are children. It was estimated that 5 million people were infected with the HIV virus in 2003. Despite worldwide HIV preven- tion efforts, there are higher numbers of indi- viduals living with HIV today then there have been in the last 5 years. 1 Individuals living with HIV/AIDS require increased levels of health care services. Accord- ing to the HIV Research Network, 2 the average number of outpatient visits for HIV patients is 10.7 per person in a year. These health care ap- pointments may entail interactions with vari- ous health care staff (i.e., physicians, nurses, psychologists, dieticians) and are critical peri- ods of time where a patient can discuss con- cerns and seek information about their disease. For the health care provider (HCP), this is a time during which the patient can be educated on appropriate health behaviors, including ad- herence to antiretroviral medications. These in- teractions can affect a patient’s attitudes and subsequently have a major impact on health be- haviors. Several studies have suggested that patients’ attitudes toward their HCP affect certain health behaviors. Research has demonstrated an as- 1 Louisiana State University, 2 Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.