Höfundar:
E. K. Svavarsdóttir, L Lima, S Lemos, L Andrade, M.C. Barbieri-Figueiredo, G.B.Tryggvadottir
Background and Purpose: Instruments that can capture changes related to family interventions are of great value to the scientific and clinical community. Measuring family members’ experiences of integrating chronic illness (CI) into their family life are needed to facilitate family care. The Family Integration Experience Scale to Chronic Illness (Meiers et. al., 2020), which is a nine-items visual analogue instrument, that describes family member experiences of integrating CI into their life, was further developed and psychometrically tested.
Methods: Family members (n=348) of children with chronic physically and psychologically conditions/illnesses, who were in active treatments answered the scale in two different countries.
Results: Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) conducted on n=111 family members in a sample in Northern Europe; confirmed the questionnaire to be 9-items with two factors emerging, a) Positive Integration (PI=3-items; alpha=0.692) and b) Negative Integration (NI=6-items; alpha=0.864); which accounted for 66.5% of the total variability. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) conducted on a sample of n=237 familes in Southern Europe, reduced the original questionnaire to 8-items with two factors emerging a) Positive Integration (PI=3-items; alpha=0.514) and b) Negative Integration (NI=5-items; alpha=0.838) with a moderate (RMSEA=0.071) to good fit (SRMR=0.069, NFI=0.979, NNFI=0.983, and CFI= 0.989). The final version of the FAM-INT-CIFL instrument consists of 8-items and two factors (PI and NI).
Conclusions and Implications: The new Likert type FAM-INT-CIFL, is a promising reliable and valid family integration to CI measure, which can capture change in family intervention research.