| Because family caregivers provide a substantial amount of informal care to dependent loved ones, the potential burden such care may place on family members is an important area for clinical research and intervention. Providing transportation is one aspect among many which family caregivers routinely provide which can add to the phenomenon of caregiver burden. Coughlin and D'Ambrosio (2012) note that over 25% of adults aged 75 or older will need alternative transportation services in the future due to disease-related inability to drive. While the provision of transportation is recognized in the literature as a caregiving task and a component of global burden, few studies, to date, have addressed this as a distinct concern for measurement and intervention.;The purpose of this study was to determine if an item set focused specifically on transportation burden would be additive to accepted global measures of burden in a volunteer sample of caregivers. This is the third phase of a combined qualitative and quantitative research effort. In Phase 1, a qualitative method was employed to examine the concept of transportation burden. In Phase 2, an iterative strategy was employed to formulate and refine a list of items concerning perceived burdens associated with the provision of transportation. A subset of these items became the proposed Transportation Burden Questionnaire (TBQ) item set. Since transportation burden is thought to contribute to caregiver burden, Phase 3 utilized exploratory factor analysis to finalize the TBQ structure. Criterion validity of this new measure was evaluated using two accepted caregiver scales, the Zarit Burden Interview (ZBI) and Caregiver Strain Index (CSI). The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) was also administered to assess for presence of depression among caregivers.;This sample included 150 self-selected, family caregivers. The mean age for this sample of caregivers was 58 and included a majority of Caucasian women that were caring for either a parent or husband who was suffering from both a cognitive and physical ailment. After exploratory factor analysis, five subthemes arose: definitive burden, extraneous factors, time and self-sacrifice, care recipient attributes, and acceptance. Three of these subthemes were consistent with preliminary qualitative studies. Criterion validity was acceptable for both the ZBI (r = 0.645) and the CSI ( r =0.615) which showed moderate correlations between the TBQ and extant scales. Overall, this sample of family caregivers had mild to moderate caregiver burden, caregiver stress, and was depressed based on total scores of the ZBI, CSI, and CES-D respectively. Based on total scores for the TBQ, the majority of this sample also showed evidence of transportation burden. This study offers a foundation for future family caregiver research because the TBQ allows for planning of tailored interventions by specifically measuring transportation burden as well as its' inherent subthemes. |
