The development of a care-giving burden scale.
A burden scale is described that is conceptually specific by concentrating on an assessment of different aspects of distress of care-giving burden and conceptually sensitive by distinguishing two dimensions: the relationship of the carer and the care-receiver and the limitations in the personal life of the carer. To develop a burden scale an analysis was carried out on a database of an intervention study in which 89 informal caregivers of psychogeriatric patients were interviewed twice. A principal components analysis was carried out showing two main factors that could be interpreted as the two dimensions mentioned above. Reliability analysis showed a Cronbach's alpha of 0.84 for the total care-giving burden scale (13 items) and 0.77 for both subscales (7 and 6 items), confirmed in an independent sample. An analysis of the hierarchy of items (Mokken Scale Analysis) showed a strong and moderate hierarchy for the subscales and the total scale, respectively. Finally, an analysis of construct validity showed strong correlations of care-giving burden with depression of the carer and deviant behaviour of the patient.
Gerritsen
J C
JC
Northern Centre for Health Care Research (NCH), p/a Academisch Ziekenhuis Groningen, The Netherlands.
van der Ende
P C
PC
D000368:Aged; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D017028:Caregivers / Q000523:psychology*; D017281:Cost of Illness; D003704:Dementia / Q000523:psychology*; D003863:Depression / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D015577:Geriatric Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results