Development and validation of a Fever Management Questionnaire aimed at parents and care givers

The symptoms of childhood fever are often inappropriately managed by care givers resulting in overuse of health resources and medication errors. Understanding care giver's knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about fever management using a validated questionnaire is warranted. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a comprehensive Fever Management Questionnaire.

The questionnaire items were developed through a content analysis of the literature and current fever management guidelines. For the knowledge component, a multidisciplinary panel of 12 experts assessed content validity of items (n = 35) through a one-round Delphi process. The construct validity of the attitudes and belief items (19 items) were assessed using principal components analysis utilising response data collected from 149 Australian parents and care givers.

Based on the responses from the panel of experts, six items were removed, six items required substantive modification, 13 items required minor modification with the remaining eight items retained in original form. For the Attitudes and Beliefs items, a parsimonious solution with three principal components resulted after removal of six cross-loading items. The factor loadings of each item displayed a strong correlation to one of three components with scores ranging from 0.791 down to 0.541. The resulting Cronbach's α for the tool was 0.729.

Psychometric testing of this two-part Fever Management Questionnaire has resulted in a tool with acceptable validity and reliability. This tool should now be used to gather the knowledge and attitudes of care givers surrounding fever management to further understand factors that lead to inappropriate fever management.