Measurement of Informal Care Giving Time: Exploring the Validity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: Due to the rising life expectancy in developed countries the prevalence of dementia is increasing. One aim of dementia care is to postpone or avoid institutional care. Performing an economic evaluation of interventions with this aim from a societal perspective has to include informal care giving. We assessed informal care giving time using a modified version of the RUD and we will report on our findings about the validity of the instrument. Methods: Within the German IDA study (dementia care initiative in primary practice) two non-medical interventions are to be compared with current practice in dementia care over a period of two years. The primary endpoint is time the patient lives at home. To assess informal care giving time we used a modified version of the RUD developed by Wimo and colleagues. The questions were completed at baseline and after one year. Informal care giving is categorized in activities of daily living (ADL), instrumental ADL (IADL), and supervision. Three hundred fifty-seven informal caregivers stated the number of days and average hours per day of care provided to the patient for each category during the last four weeks. Additionally, we asked whether the interviewees were the primary informal caregiver and they should estimate the time of all other informal caregivers who are involved in caring for the patient. The questionnaire is applied as computer-assisted telephone interview. Using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient we analyzed construct validity by correlating total informal care time and its components with measures of ADL (Barthel-Index), IADL and disturbing behavior (NOSGER subscales), cognitive status (Mini Mental-Status Examination) and subjective burden of informal caregivers (Burden Scale for Family Caregivers BSFC). Results: First analysis showed that informal care time increased with the level of impairment in ADL and IADL. We also observed a substantial correlation between the subjective burden and the informal care time. About 60% of the patients were assisted by more than one informal caregiver. Total informal care time (all caregivers) correlated better with the instruments listed above than did informal care time of only the primary caregiver. Furthermore, caregivers who cared for their partners spent significantly more time than caregivers who were not the partner. Conclusions: The extended version of the questions on informal care of the RUD showed good external construct validity. Considering only the time of the primary informal caregiver results in underestimation of resource utilization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".