The Cancer Communication Assessment Tool for Patients and Families (CCAT‐PF): a new measure

Abstract

Purpose Caregivers and cancer patients frequently have conflicting and unmet communication needs. The Cancer Communication Assessment Tool for Patients and Families (CCAT-PF) is a new instrument that assesses congruence in patient-family caregiver communication for both research and clinical purposes. Methods The scale was developed using a sample of 190 lung cancer patient - caregiver pairs. Standard psychometric procedures were used to develop and test the scale including qualitative item pool development, item reduction and ascertainment of scale properties. Results The multiple correlation of the 18-item CCAT-PF scale with the longer 30-item scale was .94. All but four items had less than 20% variance accounted for when each item was regressed on the remaining 17, indicating responses to an individual item were not readily predicted by the remaining items. Test re-test reliability was 0.35 and Cronbach’s alpha was 0.49 as the CCAT-PF scale represents the sum of mostly independent items. Higher CCAT-PF scores were significantly correlated with greater patient depression, greater patient perceived family conflict, lower patient-caregiver assessment and well-being, and less expressiveness and family cohesion. For both patients and caregivers, physical, functional and emotional well-being were not associated with CCAT-PF scores. Conclusion The CCAT-PF is a brief but reliable and valid tool. Although administering both family and patient versions is optimal, administering it to a patient or family caregiver only also produces reliable information.

Distress in Cancer Patients and Their Caregivers and Association with the Caregivers' Perception of Dyadic Communication

“…Associations between non-disclosure of cancer-related topics and caregivers' disease-related distress have been empirically investigated only in a few previous studies [24,26,27,28,29]. The correlations with caregiver strain yielded in our study were somewhat higher (r = 0.28 vs. 0.12) than in an earlier one [30] conducted in a homogeneous sample of gastrointestinal cancer patients and their spouses.…”

“…Finally, only caregivers completed the Caregiver Strain Index (CSI) [20], the Supportive Care Needs Survey (SCNS-P&C-G) [21,22] for measuring supportive care needs across the information, healthcare services, daily living, and psychological domains, and the caregivers' version of the Disclosure Scale of the Cancer Communication Assessment Tool (CCAT-F) [23,24]. This scale assesses the caregivers' perception of the patients' degree of open communication regarding cancer-related aspects (e.g.…”

Gender and Role Differences in Couples’ Communication During Cancer Survivorship

“…44 This measure comprises 2 parts; the CCAT-P is an 18 item instrument completed by the patient, and the CCAT-F, completed by the family, is an 18-item instrument that is exactly analogous to the CCAT-P. Together, they comprise the CCAT-PF.…”

Designing an oral mucositis assessment instrument for use in children: generating items using a nominal group technique

“…The development of instruments reported in the literature generally includes (1) item generation, (2) refinement of wording of items to develop the instrument, and (3) testing of the psychometric properties of the instrument [13,16,[22][23][24]. The process that we followed is represented in Fig.…”