Friday, 14 January 2005 - 8:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Families Coping with Severe Mental Illness

Concurrent Validity and the Structural Analysis of the Caregiving Appraisal Scale for Families Coping with Serious Mental Illness

Purpose: Instruments that validly assess caregivers’ experiences can provide crucial information about families coping with serious mental illness. Caregivers of persons with mental illness face specific challenges including the obligation of caring for the ill member, as well as trying to care for themselves and the rest of the family. This “burden” can be difficult to measure and may differ among families. Having a valid, sensitive measure can improve our understanding of the level of burden and challenges these families face. The purpose of this study was to continue the Caregiver Appraisal Scale (Lawton et al., 1989) validation and adaptation reported by Cabassa and Pollio (2003) by establishing concurrent validity of the Caregiver Appraisal Scale (CAS) subscales using the Family Burden Interview Schedule (FBIS: Tessler and Gamache, 1994).

Methods: A convenience sample of 159 caretakers recruited through community-based family workshops sponsored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill were interviewed with the CAS and FBIS. The CAS measures positive and negative caregiver experiences by using 28-items in four subscales: burden, satisfaction with caregiving tasks, impact of burden, and task mastery. The FBIS captures amount of time caregivers spend tending to ill relatives’ needs and how much they minded time spent. To examine validity, 30 questions (out of 45) in 4 scales from the FBIS were used for comparison. Confirmatory factory analysis tested the underlying factorial structure of the CAS, and correlations with the FBIS examined concurrent validity.

Results: All four subscales of the CAS had good internal consistency (alpha scores between 0.70-0.87). Goodness of fit indices showed both models fit the data well. Correlations between the scales were significant on three of the CAS subscales (r scores between 0.24-0.43): burden, impact, and satisfaction.

Implications: Findings indicate that use of multiple scales to measure caregiver burden, effect on family life, and time spent tending to the relative with serious mental illness can be a valid measure of the impact of chronic mental illness on the family caregivers. Valid measures of the concept and level of caregiver burden can better prepare practitioners to support families dealing with serious mental illness. As correlations were significant but somewhat lower than expected, future research should focus on explanations for this finding including culturally different definitions of ‘burden’, as well as differences in individuals’ perceptions of ‘burden’ and ‘task mastery’ within various ethnic, gender, cultural or other demographic groups.

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