Background Domestic violence (DV) is an international public health issue associated with adverse health outcomes for adults and children. There have been widespread calls to increase nurses’ capacity to respond to DV and improve undergraduate nursing education in this area. However, there are few valid, reliable and contemporary measures of nursing attitudes towards and beliefs concerning DV that are suited for use in evaluating education programmes.

Aim To establish the psychometric properties of a newly developed inventory designed to measure nursing students’ beliefs about and attitudes towards DV.

Discussion Exploratory factor analysis identified five factors, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.646. The few factors loading>.80 suggest that the instrument has good discriminate validity. The absence of cross-loadings indicate good convergent validity.

Conclusion The inventory provides one of the first validated and reliable measures for examining undergraduate nursing students’ attitudes towards and beliefs about DV.

Implications for practice The instrument is suited for use by nurse educators in assessing the influence of curriculum design and teaching strategies on student beliefs and attitudes. It would also be useful in studies investigating nurses’ clinical practice on domestic violence.