Wellbeing and Regeneration

Project: Evaluating the Index of Family Relations (IFR) scale and its suitability for use with BME families.

Main contact: Professor Angela Harden

Project team: Professor Angela Harden, Eva Lloyd (Principal Investigators), Mark McDermott (Co-Investigators), Sylvia Potter, Zahirun Sayeed

Start date: March 2009

End date: December 2009

Project funder: Family Action

Project Partners: CASS School of Education, School of Pyschology

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Background

Psychometric tools are often only validated with white populations which can create difficulties for researchers and practitioners working with diverse families. The Index of Family Relations is a 25-item global measure of family functioning developed in the USA. This scale has been used by the UK-based organisation Family Action to evaluate the support work it carries out, under the name Building Bridges, which families affected by parental mental health problems and other complex needs since 2004. Family Action received funding from the DCSF to research how the IFR could be made more user-friendly overall, but in particular when implemented with BME communities. They commissioned researchers at UEL to carry out the research for them.

Aims

The aims of this project were to a) explore how reliability and validity of the Index of Family Relations (IFR) and assess its user-friendliness; b) to explore how the scale could be made more appropriate for use with BME families; and c) to make recommendations to Family Action regarding the best options for measuring improvements in family functioning in the future.

Methods

The research combined a review of the literature, consultation with practitioners on using the IFR and a psychometric analysis of a routinely collected data set. The following steps were taken:

• Systematic literature searched were conduted to identify any available studies that described the adaptation and validation of the IFR for use with BME families. Contact with family researchers in the UK were also made to seek any unpublished studies. Alternative tools for measuring family function were also sought.
• An adapted version of the IFR was not identified so an adaptation was developed by the project team working in consultation with staff at Family Action and within the copyright laws governing the use of IFR.
• The adapted version of the IFR was translated into Bengali by the project team.
• Building Bridges staff were asked by their managers for their view on the adapted tool and further small amendments were made. Staff used the adapted tool and informal feedback was sought from two members of staff on their experiences of using the tool.
• Principal Component Analysis was carried out to examine the reliability of the scale with data on the IFR from a sample of nearly 200 cases collected by Family Action. This analysis sought to address the following questions:
  • Is the IFR a unidimensional instrument?
  • Does the IFR have good internal reliability?
  • Are there any items in the IFR that do not contribute to the internal reliability of the subscaled identified and which thereby could be dropped from practitioner usage, thereby saving time and expenditure?

Documents/references:

Final Report.  

Final version of FA report

For further information please contact: Angela Harden

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© 2010