Development And Validation Of Psychosocial Stressors And Coping Strategies Scale For Alzheimer’s Caregivers

Abstract

Caregiving of terminal illnesses is far hectic job which can negatively effect the caregivers’ physical, psychological, social and financial life. To measure the extent of these harmful effects a culturally appropriate measure of Stressors of Alzheimer’s caregivers and Coping Mechanism Scale (SACCMS) was developed in current study. An Item pool was collected through open-ended interviews using a case study approach was done in first study of this PhD dissertation and this item pool was used to generate items in first phase of this study and these items were validated by 05 subject matter experts. Content validity index 5-point Likert Stressors of SACCMS having 56 items was generated for the development of psychometric properties. For standardization of SACCMS, 168 caregivers (Men=43, Women= 125) with age range from 25 to 56+ years were recruited through purposive sampling from different areas of Punjab. Through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) five factors were generated namely psychological strain, Physical strain, Social strain, Religious coping and Positive reframing. SACCMS found to have remarkable internal consistency (α = .94). Caregiver Burden Scale by Zarit et al. (1980)) was chosen for convergent validity and The Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) was used for discriminant validity. These results suggested that SACCMS would be a promising indigenous measure of caregiver’s stressors. Results were discussed further in the context of cultural implications.