A new self-report questionnaire called "ABC" to evaluate in a clinical practice the aid perceived from services by relatives, needs and family burden of severe mental illness

Abstract

ObjectiveTo describe: a) a self-report questionnaire of 34 item, developed by a Family Association of Psychiatric Patients in collaboration with two psychiatrists to evaluate by key-relative in a clinical practice the perceived quality of mental health services, the needs and family burden; b) the methodology of validation.MethodsIt has been studied (a) the Face Validity by two focus groups of 10 relatives for each group, (b) the concurrent validity of family burden items comparing the ABC with QPF, a widely used questionnaire, in 6 Italian mental health centres on a sample of key-relatives, (c) the discriminant validity comparing three different samples of key-relatives of patients with psychiatric illness, Alzheimer or cancer. The internal consistency of items for assessing relatives' opinions on the quality of care has been evaluated by Chronbach' s α. The test-retest has been evaluated on a sample of 20 key-relatives.ResultsThe results indicate a fairly good performance of the questionnaire in this preliminary but almost complete phase of validation. The time to fill in it has been estimated in a 7 minutes average.ConclusionIt is possible by this self-report questionnaire to evaluate in a clinical routine setting and in a very short time three important problems for relatives and professionals: opinions and needs of relatives, and objective and subjective family burden of severe mental illness.

Quality of life and other outcome measures in caregivers of patients with schizophrenia

“…Of the 460 articles screened, 16 instruments were identified focusing on caregivers' burden (8) [20][21][22][23][24][25][26], coping strategies (3) [27][28][29], perception of need (3) [30][31][32] and quality of life (2) [9,33]. TABLES 1 & 2 show the characteristics of the instruments meeting the inclusion criteria.…”

“…These instruments were developed or validated from 1990 to 2012 (8 after 2000), in Canada (4) [20,21], Italy (3) [25,27,29], England (2) [28,30], Austria (1) [31], China (1) [32], France (1) [9], the Netherlands (1) [24], Spain (1) [33], Sweden (1) [26] and the USA (1) [22,23].…”

“…The item response modalities were unbalanced (3 with a 3-point and 3 with a 5-point Likert scale) [20,21,28,32,33], balanced (5 with a 4-point and 1 with 6-point Likert scale) [9,[21][22][23]26,29,30]. Three instrument presented different combinations of response modalities: 1 with 3-and 5-point Likert scale, 1 with 4-and 5-point Likert scale and 1 with 6-point Likert and dichotomic scale [24,25,27].…”

“…Among the 16 instruments, 6 were based on literature review and professionals' point of view [21,[24][25][26]30], 8 on a combined approach including experts' and relatives' experiences [20,22,23,27,29,[31][32][33] and 2 on relatives' viewpoints [9,28].…”

“…Reliability was tested for 13 instruments [9,[20][21][22][23][24][25][27][28][29]33]. Reliability was good in most cases (alpha >0.70), excepting three instruments which presented alpha less than 0.70 for several dimensions [22,23,27,33].…”