Context: Family satisfaction is an important and commonly used research measure. Yet current measures of family satisfaction are lengthy and may be unnecessarily burdensome--particularly in the setting of serious illness.
Objectives: To use an item bank to develop short forms of the Family Satisfaction with End-of-Life Care (FAMCARE) scale, which measures family satisfaction with care.
Methods: To shorten the existing 20-item FAMCARE measure, item response theory parameters from an item bank were used to select the most informative items. The psychometric properties of the new short-form scales were examined. The item bank was based on data from family members from an ethnically diverse sample of 1983 patients with advanced cancer.
Results: Evidence for the new short-form scales supported essential unidimensionality. Reliability estimates from several methods were relatively high, ranging from 0.84 for the five-item scale to 0.94 for the 10-item scale across different age, gender, education, ethnic, and relationship groups.
Conclusion: The FAMCARE-10 and FAMCARE-5 short-form scales evidenced high reliability across sociodemographic subgroups and are potentially less burdensome and time-consuming scales for monitoring family satisfaction among seriously ill patients.
Keywords: Family satisfaction; item banks; item response theory; short-form FAMCARE.
Copyright © 2015 American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.