[Transcultural validation of a measurement scale]

This monography presents the validation study results of a new scale to measure family needs: The Family Needs Inventory (IBF) (Chartier and Coutu-Wakulczyk, 1988). The scale is available in both French and English from the Departement des sciences infirmières of the Université de Sherbrooke. Based on a perceptual framework, the IBF is a self-report scale composed of 33 items. It offers three different subscores of the importance of needs: the global score of needs, the intensity need index and the total number of needs. The IBF was validated on a sample of 400 subjects. These subjects were drawn from the adult population of immediate family members visiting a patient in surgical or medical intensive care units in three different geographical regions, in Québec, northeast Ontario and France. The reliability yielded a 0.90 Cronback Alpha coefficient and the homogeneity coefficient for Spearman-Brown and Guttman procedures were 0.88 respectively. The principal component factor analysis and factorial matrices lead to examine the conceptual structure of five independent factors.