Psychiatric Times.
No. 5
Cross-National Research: Caregiver Consequences
By Bob van Wijngaarden, Ph.D., and Aart H. Schene, M.D., Ph.D.
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April 15, 2004
Dr. van Wijngaarden is a social psychologist and research associate at the Trimbos Institute, the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction in Utrecht. His thesis was on the consequences of caregiving.
Dr. Schene is professor of psychiatry and head of the program for mood disorders inthe department of psychiatry at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam.
For international research, three instruments are available. The Family Problems Questionnaire was used in a European project similar to the EPSILON study (Magliano et al., 1998). The original Italian questionnaire was translated into German, English, Greek and Portuguese. Although this instrument was well validated in Italy, to our knowledge no cross-national validation data were published. Recently, the Perceived Family Burden Scale was translated into Chinese and Spanish, and the Family Burden Scale in Spanish (Mat'as-Carrelo et al., 2003; Tsang, 2001). The psychometric properties of the translated versions have yet to be ascertained.
Therefore, although alternatives for the IEQ are available, only the IEQ has been fully validated in all language versions in cross-national research. However, researchers should be careful in their interpretation of their findings across countries, since cultural bias cannot be ruled out.
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