A geriatric care competence assessment tool for selecting family health duty bearers from family caregivers: reliability and validity test

Abstract Objectives This research aims to construct a geriatric care competence assessment tool to select family health duty bearers from family caregivers for older adults and to test its reliability and validity. Methods According to the model of Caregiver Skill Building/Effectiveness and the Knowledge-Attitude/Belief-Practice Model, we constructed a geriatric care competence assessment tool through literature review, semi-structural interviews and the Delphi method, and investigated to test the reliability and validity of this assessment tool. Results The final version of the geriatric care competence assessment tool consists of 33 items in six dimensions: caregiving knowledge, caregiving attitudes, caregiving behaviours, caregiver role adaptation, assessment and utilisation of family resources and assessment and utilisation of social resources. The overall content validity index was 0.816, and the content validity index for each item ranged from 0.83 to 1.00. Exploring factor analysis extracted six common factors, and the cumulative variance contribution rate was 68.399%. The confirmatory factor analysis showed that the six dimensions of the tool fit very well, and the convergent validity was very satisfactory. The Cronbach’s α coefficient of the tool was 0.930. Conclusions This assessment tool, which has good reliability and validity, can be used to select family health duty bearers for older adults.