Structure and measurement properties of the Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care instrument.

OBJECTIVE

In this study, the authors investigated the psychometric properties of a modified version of the Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (PACIC) - a self-report instrument designed to measure the extent to which patients with chronic illness receive care congruent with the chronic care model.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD

Five hundred and twenty-nine (529) type 2 diabetics were surveyed with a modified-PACIC.

RESULTS

An exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted that accounted for the ordinal nature of the PACIC items. Ordinal alpha (0.972) and omega (0.973) reliability coefficients were calculated on the latent factor underlying the modified-PACIC. Correlation analyses were used to investigate the relationship between the modified-PACIC and numerous clinical labs related to diabetes. Validity for the original five-factor structure proposed by developers of the PACIC could not be confirmed.

CONCLUSIONS

More research focusing on the instrument's psychometric properties is necessary before researchers use it to investigate the chronic care model and patient health. Researchers will need to ensure that the composite scores underlying the instrument are normally distributed and correlated with behavioural and health indexes.