Measuring Helping Relationships in Promoting Healthy Lifestyle for Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease

Purpose: This research was to evaluate the psychometric properties of an instrument developed to measure the helping relationships for practicing healthy lifestyle among Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) patients from significant others. Helping relationships from significant others assist people to maintain healthy lifestyle, improve quality of life and postpone the progression of CKD. Significant others may give support to build up competence of decision-making and insistence through satisfaction and intimacy relationship, such as empathy, caring, trust, listening, acceptance, understanding, praise and suggestion for facilitating healthy lifestyle to patients with CKD.

Methods: This was a descriptive study using cross-sectional design. Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease were recruited from August 2013 to July 2014 at outpatient clinics in two hospitals in Southern Taiwan. Data were collected using self-report questionnaires and analyzed using descriptive statistics. Expert validity was applied to evaluate the content validity of this instrument using content validity index (CVI). Internal consistency, Cronbach’s alpha, was adopted for evaluating the reliability. Item difficulty and item discrimination were calculated to describe each item. Explore factor analysis were used for construct validity.

Results: Total of 250 subjects participated in this study. The equivalence, clarity and readability of content validity index (CVI) were 97%, 98% and 98%, separately. The overall reliability of Cronbach’s Alpha was appropriate (>.90). The item analysis indicated the discrimination and difficulty of each item within an acceptable range. Item-total correlations of the overall scales ranged from 0.50 to 0.94, and item-subscale correlations ranged from 0.50 to 0.94. The 2-factor model of Helping Relationships questionnaire explained, respectively, 75.0% and 6.2% of total variance; the two together explained 81.2% of total variance.

Conclusion: The psychometrics revealed that the questionnaire is valid and reliable. The final instrument was composed two factors and 24 items. These findings have implications for patients with CKD to build up, maintaining healthy lifestyles and delay progression of CKD through helping from significant others.