The development of the Korean family function assessment tool

ABSTRACT

As the effect of the families on the individual's health and disease is profound, it is very important to care patients based on the understanding of their families. The family function assessment tool to evaluate the families objectively and easily is necessary for this purpose. Many instruments have been developed in other countries and we have used these instruments without verification. Therefore, there is a question whether they are appropriate to the Korean families. The family function is especially important to the family with adolescents because adolescents are characterized by psychological instability. My purpose of this research is to develop an instrument to assess the function of the Korean families and this research is made on the Korean families with adolescents. 1,600 middle and high school students and 1,600 of their parents were selected for this study. They were asked to describe 5 kinds of each good and bad family relationship to collect primary basic data. These data were arranged to items based on the established scales and subscales. Secondary basic data were collected from another 200 students and their 200 parents to compliment the items. Preliminary instrument items were selected by the frequency of the responses and the judgement of the author. Through discussions with experts, the preliminary instrument was established. Accessibility was tested and factor analysis was done for the preliminary instrument. After this process, the main instrument was formulated. For the primary basic data, 2,382 people answered (response rate 74.4%) and 10,267 responses and 298 kinds of items were collected. There was no additional item from the secondary data collection. The preliminary instrument was made of 58 items selected from 298 items. It takes 8 minutes to complete this instrument in average and 97% of the subjects had no difficulty in completing it. The main test instrument, developed after factor analysis, was made of 7 scales with 40 items.