Development and Validation of Family Adjustment Inventory

FAI was developed in two different forms:

• for parents with one children suffering from a chronic disease or ill children who has siblings younger than 3 years old - FAI-O (only child);
• for parents with at least two children, the brother/sister of the ill child has 3 years or more- FAS-S (siblings) The two forms are identical, with the exception that FAI-S has an additional dimension with respect to FAI-O, that specifically regards the involvement of siblings in the illness path of the sick brother/sister.

Development of FAI followed several steps:

• definition of initial instrument dimensions
• item wording for each dimension
• definition of scoring
• focus group with parents of patients suffering from a chronic disease to evaluate item content and linguistic clarity

Validation of FAI for each form (FAI-O and FAI-S):

Validation consists in several steps, identical for the two versions but in different in timing, depending on the number of admnistration.

• first phase: the FAI is administered to parents of patients with different chronic disease (each form needs to reach the total of 300 administrations).
• second phase: statistical analysis aimed to obtain the final version of each FAI form (define actual dimensions and most adequate items)
• third phase: administration to a new sample of parents of children suffering from a chronic disease (each form needs to reach the total of 150 administrations).
• fourth phase: statistical analysis aimed to confirm the adequacy of the instrument

Inclusion criteria

• consent for participating in the study
• having a child suffering from a chronic illness and treated in the hospital in the following specialties: onco-hematology, neuro-oncology, diabetology, cystic fibrosis, metabolic disease, gastroenterology, cardiology, nephrology, rheumatology, allergology, pneumology, immunology, intensive care unit
• italian speaking

Exclusion criteria

• cognitive impairment
• no good knowledge of italian language