Turkish Version of Caregiver Difficulties Scale: a Study of Reliability and Validity

CDS is a self-administered questionnaire designed to be completed by the principal caregiver of the child with Cerebral palsy.The 4 subscales of CDS and the corresponding items are as follows.Concerns for the child, Impact on self, Support for caregiving, Support for caregiving.There is no definite cut off threshold for CDS; the total CDS score can be used to get an idea about the level of burden experienced by the caregivers, a higher score indicating a higher level of burden.CDS shows that a high CDS score (above 42) is predictive of caregiver psychological problems. Therefore, CDS is also useful as a potential screening tool for identification of caregivers who are at risk of psychological problems such as stress, depression and anxiety.After the second application,the consistency and problems of the CDS questionnaire were reviewed.

The original objective of the Impact on Family Scale is to assess the effect of a child's illness or health condition on the family. All items had astandard four-point scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree.The four factors measured General Negative Impact (11 items), Disruption of Social Relations (nine items), Coping (four items), and Financial Impact (three items).Items are scored on a Likert scale.A low score indicates a higher impact of the chronic disease on the parents. Scores are calculated as percentages according to the highest scores of each part, using inverse proportion computing.

The NHP is an instrument designed to measure subjective health status containing 38items(answered "yes" or "no") that assess subjective distress in six subgroups:physical mobility (eight items), pain (eight items), sleep (five items), emotional reactions (nine items), social isolation (five items),and energy (three items). Scores for each subgroup range from 0 (no problem) to 100 (all problems listed were present).

The FSS, which was published in 1989 by Krupp, has nine items. For each question, the patient is asked to choose a number from 1 to 7 that indicates how much the patient agrees with each statement, where 1 indicates strong disagreement and 7 indicates strong agreement. A score of 4 or higher generally indicates severe fatigue.

This inventory comprises 21 questions, each with four possible answers (score: 0-3). If a symptom is more severe, the score will be higher. The higher the total score, the more depressed the patient.er the total score, the more depressed the patient. The Beck scores are divided in six grades of depression, according to the original description of the scores: 0-9: no or minimal depression 10-14: on the border of a depression 15-20: mild depression.21-30: mild-moderate depression. 31-40: moderate-severe depression. 41-63: severe depression.

WHOQOL-BREF was scored over four domains: Physical Capacity (7 items), Psychological Well-being (6 items), Social Relationship (4 items), and Environment (9 items). All items were rated on a 5-point scale with a higher score indicating a higher quality of life.Domain scores were calculated by multiplying the mean of all facet scores included in each domain by a factor of 4, and accordingly, potential scores for each domain ranged from 4-20.Responses from the two items of the Overall Quality of Life and General Health facet were calculated as a single score with a range of 4-20, as with the scoring method for the four domain scores.