Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2007 Sep 18:3:15.
doi: 10.1186/1745-0179-3-15.

A new self-report questionnaire called "ABC" to evaluate in a clinical practice the aid perceived from services by relatives, needs and family burden of severe mental illness

Franco Veltro  1 , Pierluigi Morosini, Antonella Gigantesco, Massimo Casacchia, Rita Roncone, Giuseppe Dell'acqua, Elvira Chiaia, Andrea Balbi, Renzo De Stefani, Giampiero Cesari
Affiliations

A new self-report questionnaire called "ABC" to evaluate in a clinical practice the aid perceived from services by relatives, needs and family burden of severe mental illness

Franco Veltro et al. Clin Pract Epidemiol Ment Health. .

Abstract

Objective: To describe: a) a self-report questionnaire of 34 item, developed by a Family Association of Psychiatric Patients in collaboration with two psychiatrists to evaluate by key-relative in a clinical practice the perceived quality of mental health services, the needs and family burden; b) the methodology of validation.

Methods: It has been studied (a) the Face Validity by two focus groups of 10 relatives for each group, (b) the concurrent validity of family burden items comparing the ABC with QPF, a widely used questionnaire, in 6 Italian mental health centres on a sample of key-relatives, (c) the discriminant validity comparing three different samples of key-relatives of patients with psychiatric illness, Alzheimer or cancer. The internal consistency of items for assessing relatives' opinions on the quality of care has been evaluated by Chronbach' s alpha. The test-retest has been evaluated on a sample of 20 key-relatives.

Results: The results indicate a fairly good performance of the questionnaire in this preliminary but almost complete phase of validation. The time to fill in it has been estimated in a 7 minutes average.

Conclusion: It is possible by this self-report questionnaire to evaluate in a clinical routine setting and in a very short time three important problems for relatives and professionals: opinions and needs of relatives, and objective and subjective family burden of severe mental illness.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Chamberlin J. User/consumer involvement in mental health service delivery. Epidemiol Psichiatr Soc. 2005;1:10–14. - PubMed
    1. Brewin CR, Veltro F, Wing JK, MacCarthy B, Brugha TS. The assessment of psychiatric disability in the community: a comparison of clinical, staff and family interviews. Br J Psychiatry. 1990;157:671–674. - PubMed
    1. Slade M, Phelan M, Thornicroft G. A comparison of needs assessed by staff and by an epidemiologically representative sample of patients with psychosis. Psychol Med. 1998;28:43–550. doi: 10.1017/S0033291798006564. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Thornicroft G, Slade M. Comparing needs assessed by staff and by service users: paternalism or partnership in mental health? Epidemiol Psichiatr Soc. 2002;11:186–191. - PubMed
    1. Thornicroft G, Tansella M. Growing recognition of the importance of services user involvement in mental health service planning and evaluation. Epidemiol Psichiatr Soc. 2005;14(1):1–3. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources