Speaker
Description
Caregiver burden refers to the multifaceted strain experienced by informal caregivers assisting a loved one suffering from a severe medical condition. Despite the crucial role of this construct in health psychology, one of the most used measurement tools to assess it lacks a full validation.
Indeed, the original study providing the ZBI Italian adaptation only utilized a principal component analysis, and not an exploratory factor analysis, resulting in a 5-factor structure that was never tested with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).
In a large sample of Italian caregivers, this structure was tested in a CFA model which yielded unacceptable goodness-of-fit indices. Consequently, the sample was divided in two parts. In Study 1, in the first sample an exploratory graph analysis (EGA) – a modern technique from network psychometrics – identified a 3-dimensional solution. However, this solution exhibited problematic cross-loadings and lacked stability across the 10’000 bootstrap replications. Thus, the 5 problematic items with cross-loadings and low stability were removed, and another EGA was estimated on the remaining items. This identified a 3-factor solution with non-problematic network cross-loading and good stability across bootstrap replications.
In Study 2, the factorial structure resulting from the EGA was then specified in a CFA model, which provided good fit indices (after correlating the residuals of two semantically correlated items within the same dimension).
The integration of both modern and traditional techniques in psychological assessment enabled the validation of a psychometrically sound assessment tool, with useful implications for clinical and research purposes.
| If you're submitting a symposium talk, what's the symposium title? | “Procedure di assessment e testing dalla ricerca di base alla pratica clinica” - Simposio della Prof. Monica Mazza |
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| If you're submitting a symposium, or a talk that is part of a symposium, is this a junior symposium? | No |
