Family Burden Interview Scale for relatives of psychiatric patients (FBIS-BR): reliability study of the Brazilian version.

OBJECTIVE

Psychiatric deinstitutionalization resulted in greater involvement of families in daily care of patients. Family caregivers burden has been described by international researches. In Brazil very few studies investigated family burden with validated scales, perhaps due to the restrict availability of scales to measure this construct. The present study examined the reliability of the Brazilian version of the Family Burden Interview Schedule.

METHOD

Scale reliability was assessed through its internal consistency and temporal stability. A sample of 243 family caregivers of psychiatric patients attending public outpatient services were interviewed with the scale. Socio-demographic data were collected with a standardized form. A sub-sample of 42 relatives participated in a re-test, after 3 weeks, for assessment of the scale temporal stability.

RESULTS

Cronbach alpha coefficients ranged from 0.58 to 0.90 for global and domains scores. Pearson correlation coefficients and intra-class correlation coefficients for test and retest ranged from 0.54 to 0.90.

DISCUSSION

Results for internal consistency were similar to the original scale. Four subscales presented alpha coefficients superior to the original ones. The temporal stability cannot be compared because this analysis was not performed for the original scale.

CONCLUSION

The Brazilian version of the scale had good psychometric properties of temporal stability and internal consistency.