Study Instrument

A self-administered questionnaire was designed after a thorough literature review of the relevant published studies [11–13, 16–18] (S1 Text). An initial version of the questionnaire was subjected to content and face validity. For content validity, the questionnaire was sent to a panel of 3 subject experts for their opinion on the relativity and the importance of the content. Necessary adjustments were made to the questionnaire prior to administering it to a small group of 10 community pharmacists for their suggestions on making the questionnaire more brief and simple. The proposed changes were integrated into the questionnaire while ensuring its consistency with the published literature. Reliability coefficient was calculated by using SPSS v.20 and the value of Cronbach’s alpha was calculated as 0.72 and 0.74 for perceptions and practices section respectively. The data of the pilot study was not used for the final analysis. The final instrument consisted of 24 items which were divided into three sections. The first section included 5 questions which explored the demographic information of the participants. The second section, comprised of 8 questions, assessed the perceptions of participants towards AMS. The responses of the participants in this section were recorded on 5 points Likert scale of agreement. A score of 1 was given to strongly disagree, 2 to disagree, 3 to Neutral, 4 to agree and 5 to strongly agree. The last section evaluated the practices of participants towards AMS by assessing their responses towards 11 questions. A 5 points Likert scale level of frequency was used to record participants’ practices towards AMS. A score of 1 was given to never, 2 to rarely, 3 to occasionally, 4 to often and 5 to always. Reverse coding was done for negatively worded statements.