Development and validation of the Family Meaning of Nursing-Home Visits Scale

Aims and objectives: The purpose of this study was to develop and test a Family Meaning of Nursing-Home Visits Scale that can be used to assess and document family members' rationale for visiting nursing home residents.

Background: Understanding the meaning ascribed by families for visiting nursing home residents is necessary to develop intervention programmes that facilitate the quality of families' nursing home visits. No valid and reliable instrument is available in Taiwan or elsewhere to accurately document the meaning of family visits to nursing home residents.

Design: A cross-sectional design was used to collect survey data from family members of nursing home residents as the quantitative component of a mixed-methods study. Items were developed based on qualitative data from our previous research and that of others. This initial pool of items was used to develop and validate the scale.

Methods: The validity of the scale was confirmed by exploratory factor analysis and criterion-related validity testing. Internal consistency reliability was assessed by Cronbach's alphas.

Results: Factor analysis yielded a six-factor final solution (32 items), accounting for 66·76% of the variance. For criterion-related validity, 'responsibility for care quality' was negatively correlated with satisfaction with nursing home caregiving (r = -0·23, p < 0·01) and nursing home rehabilitation activities (r = -0·17, p < 0·05). Cronbach's α for each subscale ranged from 0·68-0·98, and Cronbach's α for the total scale was 0·83.

Conclusions: The Family Meaning of Nursing-Home Visits Scale has acceptable internal consistency reliability, good content validity and acceptable construct validity.

Relevance to clinical practice: The Family Meaning of Nursing-Home Visits Scale provides nurses and healthcare providers an objective and consistent method to explore the priority of meanings family members assign to nursing home visits. Based on this priority for visiting, interventions could be designed to increase the quality of visits, thus promoting families' continued incentive to visit in person.