Mental Health Survey Paper

Background and overview of the survey The survey used in this paper is from a comprehensive set of different surveys in a project on terminally ill cancer patients and their informal caregivers. The project aims to examine the effect of mental health on patient’s comfort at death and caregiver’s bereavement adjustment. The selected survey was used to collect data of chronically distresses of bereaved caregivers after the death of their beloved ones at the follow-up study one year after the baseline study. The survey was designed based on the Inventory of Complicated Grief – Caregiver version (Prigerson et al, 1995; Prigerson et al., 1999) with Cronbach’s α= .90 or above (Beery et al., 1997; van Doorn, 1997). Two hundred and seventy primary

First, this survey is a comprehensive set of valid questions regarding chronological distresses of caregivers. The questions are suitable for clinical diagnosis purpose of the survey. The questions are also organized in different sections based on the categorization of clinical disorders and symptoms, e.g., depression, social phobia, etc. In addition, there is a consistency of questions within a section. For example, in section PC, questions PC3 – PC21 are probed for an understanding of different symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as: “Did you have dreams about the illness in the past month?” (PC4) or “In the past month, have you stayed away from things or people that remind you of the

The survey, in overall, is lengthy. Although all questions are necessary for clinical diagnosis, finishing this long and complex survey may exhaust interviewees. Besides, in this lengthy survey, there are no sections of introduction and demographic information in the survey. It may be assumed that this is a follow-up survey, and interviewers already collected demographical data from the base-line study. However, it is necessary to inform interviewees the particular purpose of the follow-up study. Regarding response formatting, there are some issues which should be considered.
Five response options were arranged in the following order (from left to right): (1) No, (2) Sub, (3) Yes, (7) Ref, (8) DK. First, even though the five-option response is not a scale, it appears illogical in this arrangement when option “Yes” is put at the middle while two sides of the response contain option “No” or “Ref” and “DK.” Second, the coding numbers of five response options are not consistent with 1, 2, 3, and 7, 8., which may cause confusion in the coding process. Third, coding numbers do not always have labels that may be inconvenient for interviewers to code during the interviews. Fourth, some questions like PS11 and PS13 (page 12) including different sub-questions but the response is available only one time for the umbrella questions. Likewise, in question like PS9 (page 11), there is a sub-question under this question but