Development and validation of care stress management scale in family caregivers for people with Alzheimer: a sequential-exploratory mixed-method study

BACKGROUND: Caring for a person with Alzheimer’s disease is stressful for caregivers. So that, considering all the emotional and financial costs imposed on the families of Alzheimer’s patients, stress from caring is an issue that cannot be ignored and plans need to be developed to help these caregivers to manage the care properly. The current study was designed to develop a valid and reliable care stress management scale for family caregivers of patients with Alzheimer’s. METHODS: This study is a methodological study with a sequential-exploratory mixed-method approach that was performed in two-phase: develop the caring stress management scale and evaluate the psychometric properties of the scale. In the first phase, 14 semi-structured face-to-face interviews were performed with family caregivers of patients with Alzheimer’s. The interviews were transcribed immediately and an item pool with 275 items was prepared. After removing the duplicate or overlapping code, the initial format of the caring stress management scale (CSMS) was designed. In the second step, the items of the CSMS were evaluated using face and content validity. After that, the construct validity was evaluated using exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and convergent and divergent validity respectively. Finally, the reliability was assessed by stability and internal consistency. The sample size was 435 and data was gathered via an online form questionnaire. RESULTS: This study designed the CSMS with two factors including emotional-focused coping (4 items) and problem-focused coping (4 items) that explained 51.00% of the total variance. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis showed a good model fit. Furthermore, the internal consistency and stability of this scale were acceptable. CONCLUSION: The results showed that the care stress management scale has two factors in Iranian family caregivers and it is valid and reliable and can be used by therapists and researchers.