Caring perception questionnaire of the home-dwelling elderly: development and validation study.

Abstract

Background: The care requirements of the elderly who live at home should receive enough attention as the world's population ages. On the basis of this, a questionnaire on the elderly who live at home must be created and validated.

Objective: The objective is to create and validate a tool that will allow caregivers to more accurately measure how well-cared-for elderly people perceive them to be at home.

Methods: This study developed a caring perception questionnaire through literature review and interviews in Wuhan. Fifteen experts from six provinces reviewed the initial 43-item draft. When faulty questionnaires were eliminated, the valid sample size for the exploratory factor analysis of the first survey was 238. For confirmatory factor analysis, the second survey's valid sample size was 260. The final version included 31 items, validated for reliability and validity.

Results: A 52-item questionnaire was created based on interviews, refined to 43 items after expert feedback, with a content validity index of 0.88. The first survey (238 valid responses) showed a Cronbach's α of 0.945, and the second (260 valid responses) confirmed good model fit and consistency. The final version has 31 items.

Conclusions: With good reliability and validity, the caring perception questionnaire of the home-dwelling elderly was developed, which could be used as a tool to evaluate the current situation of humanistic care for the home-dwelling elderly.