Development and validation of assessment of psycho-education of carers questionnaire: An early experience

Background and Objective: Psycho-education is an intervention integrating psychotherapeutic and educational strategies. Whilst carer psycho-education is known to aid in psychiatric disorders, at present there is no known tool to assess the degree to which this is routinely provided by mental health professionals. Our objective was to develop and validate a tool, in English, which assesses psycho-education of carers of psychiatric patients in Pakistan.

Methods: A questionnaire was generated in English. It was pretested on twenty male and female carers and was refined to attain a more reliable version. Sixty bilingual male and female primary carers, who were fluent in English, and had been in a care-giving role for more than three months were requested to complete the developed Questionnaire for the Assessment of Psycho-Education of Carers (APEC) at Fatima Memorial Hospital Psychiatry Out-patient department within a period of four months from December, 2017 to April, 2018. Carers were identified via patients presenting to a psychiatric OPD. Responses were analyzed for reliability and test retest consistency using Cronbach’s alpha analysis, Intraclass correlation coefficients, factor analysis and Paired t-test.

Results: APEC was found to be easily understandable and capable of adequately assessing aspects of psycho-education. A high degree of internal consistency was demonstrated on cronbach’s alpha analysis. Cronbach’s α coefficient for various domains was sufficiently high ranging from 0.76 to 0.960. Similarly, domains of (APEC) were highly correlated. Test-retest reliability was assessed by computing the correlation between Visits 1 and 2 scores.

Conclusion: The developed questionnaire can adequately assess psycho-education of primary carers in mental health settings.