A tool for measuring the asthma self-management competency of families

A tool for measuring a family's asthma self-management behaviour has been developed for a study examining the relationships of asthma self-management behaviour, knowledge, and psychosocial factors with various indices of morbidity in children with asthma. The tool involves a structured interview which includes three typical situations of asthma self-management (scenarios). Each of the scenarios is divided into graded challenges. A scoring schedule was developed according to the critical incidents of self-management inherent in each situation. This schedule was then applied to the verbatim transcripts of the subjects' responses. These were presented to 380 asthmatic children aged 5-11 yr and their primary caregivers. Inter-rater reliability, inter-rater agreement and test-retest reliability coefficients indicate that the scores obtained are stable across raters and time. Correlations between scores on different scenarios suggest there is a common factor of self-management competency across all scenarios, but families are better at some aspects of self-management than others. The distribution of scores for each scenario is presented. The place of this tool as a means of assessing self-management behaviour is discussed.