Construction and validation of an instrument for the evaluation of family crises

Abstract

Introduction: Today, there has been evidence of an increase in family crises, which is why it is important to design a new documentary instrument for the evaluation of family crises. Objective: To build and validate an instrument for the evaluation of family crises. Materials and methods: In the qualitative evaluation, the content validity was estimated through the selection of 10 experts, who through an observation guide evaluated the sufficiency, relevance and clarity of the written items. The experts made observations that were taken into account, leading to a second round. Subsequently, the pilot test was applied to 260 beneficiaries over 18 years of age, both sexes, where the participants made suggestions about the instrument, for which a second pilot test was carried out. In the quantitative evaluation, internal and external validity was estimated through construct validity, reliability, stability and criterion validity. Finally, an instrument of 9 domains (marriage, expansion, dispersion, independence, withdrawal, dismemberment, increase, demoralization and disorganization) with 52 items was constructed. Results: An instrument was validated to evaluate normative and paranormative crises with discriminatory capacity, yielding different variances and a positive Pearson correlation. Reliability was 0.965 through Cronbach's alpha coefficient and Cohen's Kappa index 0.843 for reproducibility. The linear regression model confirmed its efficacy in predicting normative and paranormative crises. Conclusions: An instrument was built and validated, which will allow the evaluation of normative and paranormative crises.