Validez de la escala de soledad UCLA en cuidadores de pacientes crónicos en Colombia.

Introduction: loneliness in family caregivers is a frequent experience due to the demands of caring for a chronically ill person. Objective: to determine the face and content validity of the UCLA in family caregivers of people with chronic disease. Method: psychometric study of face and content validation of the UCLA scale. Experts in the field participated in the content validation and the items were assessed in terms of clarity, redundancy and relevance. The Lawshe index modified by Tristan was the statistic used for analysis. For face validation, family caregivers of people with chronic disease participated in a cognitive interview and the areas of comprehension, retrieval, judgment, adequacy of response options and question content were analyzed. Results: content validity: 9 of 18 items of the UCLA scale presented adjusted CVI higher than 0.8. Item 8 presented an adjusted CVI of 0.66, which required analysis and semantic adjustment by the validation committee. Regarding face validity, from the cognitive interview process it was evidenced that for all items 86% or more of the participants reported adequate comprehension, retrieval, judgment and appropriateness of the items. After qualitative analysis of the responses, item 7 required semantic adjustment. Conclusions: the UCLA scale has acceptable content and face validity for its use in caregivers of people with chronic disease in Colombia. A semantically adjusted version of the instrument is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]