Psychosocial inventory for caregivers (PIC) of persons with mental illness: Content validity and cognitive...

Content validity and cognitive interview plays a vital role in tool construction and contributes significantly in determining the psychometric properties of a tool.

The study aimed to present the content validation process, using expert judgment and to illustrate the use of a cognitive interviewing method for gathering validity evidence on the response process of psychosocial inventory for caregivers (PIC) of persons with mental illness.

This is a descriptive, psychometric study on content validity through expert judgment which was conducted at the LGB Regional Institute of mental health, Assam, India. Convenience and intentional sampling were used for the selection of the field expert. In this study, the psychosocial inventory for caregivers (PIC) of persons with mental illness was validated by 10 mental health professionals from India. The present study proceeded in three phases. Phase-1, an item pool (150 items) was generated. Phase-2, content validity was calculated based on the content validity index (CVI) and content validity ratio (CVR). Phase-3, cognitive interview (CI) was done. The study was approved by the institute ethics committee (IEC) of LGBRIMH, Tezpur.

Through content validity procedure, 39 items out of 150 were discarded, whereas, through cognitive interview 27 out of 111 items were deleted. So, altogether 84 items were retained for the final scale 'psychosocial inventory for caregivers (PIC) of persons with mental illness. Universal agreement (UA) was 0.6.

In present study, content validity was found to be satisfactory. Yet, further studies are needed to evaluate its reliability and validity.