Development of a Caregiver Burden Questionnaire for the Patients with Dementia in Iran

Objectives: the purpose of this study was to design a valid questionnaire suitable to the iranian culture to measure the stress mounted on dementia caregivers.methods: in order to design a valid and reliable tool, the stages of content validation were performed as follows: 1- development: search of relevant electronic databanks and use of experts and caregivers' opinions to prepare appropriate content, review and correction of the content through consecutive focus group discussions with experts. 2- judgment quantification: determination of inter-rater agreement (ira), relevancy and clarity of each of the items and the tool as a whole. reliability was measured with cronbach's alpha, and repeatability was measured with intra-cluster correlation through repeated test-piloting at 2-3 week in-tervals.results: using a conservative approach, the ira for the overall relevancy and clarity of the tool was 87.87% and 81.81%, respectively. through overall agreement (the items that were recognized as appropriate by 100% of the specialists were divided by the total number of items) the overall relevancy of the tool obtained was 98.62%. the overall clarity of the tool was calculated through the mean clarity of the questions and was 99.3%, and eventually its comprehensiveness was 100%. the overall cronbach's alpha was 94% and the intra-cluster correlation that was obtained through comparing the overall score of the questionnaire in the pre-test and test phase was 97%.conclusions: the new tool has good reliability and validity suit-able to iranian dementia patients and their caregivers' culture. researchers can use this tool to monitor the pressure mounted on dementia caregivers and to assess interventions in this group.