Family satisfaction with nursing facility care.

BACKGROUND We present the psychometric properties of our nursing facility family satisfaction questionnaire (NF-FSQ), and the steps used to develop this instrument. METHODS Family members from 14 nursing facilities in Pennsylvania were mailed the NF-FSQ. Factor analyses were used to test the extent to which the items in each domain represented the same underlying construct. To further report the applied psychometric properties of the instrument we used the completeness of data, score distributions, item-scale consistency and reliability of domain scores. RESULTS Of the 550 surveys mailed, 387 usable surveys were returned (70% response rate). Factor analyses show that the items were representative of the underlying factors. The percentage of family members not providing responses for each question was low, and varied from 1.0% to 3.4%. The floor and ceiling effects of the responses for each of the 20 questions were low. The item-scale internal consistency analyses determined that the correlation of items within indexes were higher than those with other indexes. Cronbach's alphas for the domains were all higher than usually recommended levels. CONCLUSIONS We believe we have produced a short, psychometrically sound family member satisfaction instrument for use in nursing homes. We also show that response rates from family members can be very high.