This study was done to develop and validate a measure to evaluate the Korean version of psychological insulin resistance (K-PIR) in patients with diabetes in Korea.

Items were initially generated from literature reviews and interviews with 19 patients with diabetes. The content validity of the items was evaluated by experts. Participants were 424 patients with diabetes recruited through convenience sampling. A cross-sectional survey was designed for item-analysis, exploratory factor analysis with principal axis factoring, and confirmatory factor analysis. Cronbach's alpha was calculated to measure the internal consistency.

For the 24 items of the Korean version of psychological insulin resistance, six items were eliminated because of low correlation with the other items. Exploratory factor analysis with 18-item showed that two factors (psycho-cognitive factor and supportive factor) explained 41.8% of the variance, and the factor structure of K-PIR model had a good fit. Internal consistency of K-PIR with 18 items revealed good reliability.

The findings show that the K-PIR is reliable for measuring the psychological resistance to insulin therapy for Korean patients with diabetes. However, further study is needed to evaluate the validation because the proportion of variation of K-PIR was low in this study.