To Örebro University

BACKGROUND: Family involvement in care can be seen as a prerequisite for high-quality family-centered care. It has been identified to improve both patient safety and the quality of care by reducing patient complications and hospital length of stay.

OBJECTIVE: To develop and evaluate the content validity of a questionnaire measuring family involvement in inpatient care.

METHODS: The study followed a systematic approach in building a rigorous questionnaire: identification of domain, item generation, and assessment of content validity. The content validity index was calculated based on ratings of item relevance by an expert group consisting of seven senior nurses. Subsequently, 19 online cognitive interviews using the Think-aloud method were conducted with family members of former patients who had undergone open-heart surgery.

RESULTS: Five aspects of family involvement were identified, and the initial pool of items were selected from two preexisting questionnaires. The experts' ratings resulted in item content validity of 0.71-1.00, and the scale content validity/averaging was 0.90, leading to rewording, exclusion, and addition of items. The pretesting of items through two rounds of cognitive interviews with family members resulted in the identification of three main problem areas: defining family involvement, misinterpretation of different terms, and underuse of the not relevant response option. The problems were adjusted in the final version of the questionnaire, which consists of 16 items with a four-point Likert scale and two open-ended items.

CONCLUSIONS: The Family Involvement in Care Questionnaire has demonstrated potential in evaluating family involvement in inpatient care. Further psychometric properties regarding reliability and validity need to be established.