Department of Psychology, Chair of Health Psychology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Nägelsbachstr. 49a, 91052, Erlangen, Germany.
Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Vinzenz Pallotti University gGmbH, Vallendar, Germany.
BMC Psychol. 2024 Jun 11;12(1):342. doi: 10.1186/s40359-024-01840-4.
An important factor that has not been directly addressed very often in caregiver (CG) counseling to date is the quality of the relationship between the CG and the care recipient (CR). One reason is the lack of availability of a suitable assessment tool that is not strongly influenced by social desirability. Here, we present and evaluate a new item for the assessment of relationship quality (RQ) in the context of informal caregiving of older people.
N = 962 informal caregivers of older people participated. Our item assessed RQ by providing three answer categories (positive, neutral, and negative) that were presented through the use of smiley faces. For evaluation, and to avoid bias due to social desirability, the neutral and negative categories were combined. We calculated a stepwise binary logistic regression.
Expected associations with the variables care burden, perceived positive aspects, and care motivation were found (all p values < 0.01). An exploratory analysis revealed that additional predictors of RQ consisted of the CR's age as well as whether the CR's diagnosis was dementia, CG's amount of dysfunctional coping, and whether the CG was caring for more than one CR.
We conclude that our item is well-suited for the assessment of RQ in the context of informal caregiving of older people. Because it uses language-free answer categories by means of smiley faces, our item can be applied easily. Bias due to social desirability can be minimized by dichotomization (i.e., combining the negative and neural answer categories). In future research, our tool should be evaluated in other contexts.
迄今为止，在照顾者（CG）咨询中，一个尚未被经常直接提及的重要因素是 CG 与护理对象（CR）之间关系的质量。原因之一是缺乏一种合适的评估工具，这种工具不会受到社会期望的强烈影响。在这里，我们提出并评估了一种新的项目，用于评估老年人非正式护理背景下的关系质量（RQ）。
共有 962 名老年人的非正式照顾者参与了研究。我们的项目通过使用笑脸提供三个回答类别（积极、中立和消极）来评估 RQ。为了进行评估，并避免因社会期望而产生的偏差，将中立和消极类别进行了合并。我们进行了逐步二元逻辑回归分析。
发现与变量照顾负担、感知到的积极方面和照顾动机存在预期关联（所有 p 值均<0.01）。探索性分析表明，RQ 的其他预测因素包括 CR 的年龄、CR 是否患有痴呆症、CG 的功能失调应对程度，以及 CG 是否照顾一个以上的 CR。
我们得出结论，我们的项目非常适合评估老年人非正式护理背景下的 RQ。由于它使用了无语言的笑脸回答类别，因此易于应用。通过二分法（即将负面和中性回答类别合并）可以最小化因社会期望而产生的偏差。在未来的研究中，应该在其他背景下评估我们的工具。
