An examination of the psychometric properties of the occupational identity questionnaire for community-living elderly who require care.

INTRODUCTION: Authors created an Occupational Identity Questionnaire Provisional version (OIQ-P) to assess occupational identity for elderly individuals. The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the OIQ-P. METHODS: Participants included 135 (42 males) elderly who lived locally and required care or support. OIQ-P was evaluated in terms of structural validity, criterion validity and internal consistency. RESULTS: Based on the results of an exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, an OIQ with a factor structure of 3 factors and 14 items was created. Rasch rating scale model revealed that 14 participants and 1 item did not fit the goodness of fit, nevertheless, the overall result was good. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient indicates that there was a law correlation between OIQ and the occupational identity scale of the Occupational Performance History Interview Version 2. In terms of internal consistency, the person separation index and person separation reliability coefficient were 2.30 and 0.84, respectively. CONCLUSION: This study confirmed the structural validity, criterion validity and internal consistency for the OIQ. To enhance the clinical utility of the OIQ, it is necessary to examine the interpretability and conduct an intervention study using the OIQ.

["My tiny windows"--a nurse's point of view--case study from a home palliative care meeting].

In visiting nursing care for home palliative care, nurses should take medical care with a holistic viewpoint. Nurses are not only a daily care provider to clients, but nurses are also necessary to think of themselves as being a person because they are in contact with clients' lives every day. In this home palliative care case, nurses had a chance to intervene with a woman with end-stage-cancer. Once in a while, the client had refused visiting nursing care with no reason. So it was necessary to have meetings frequently to discuss the problem. One of the things we thought was that we had to listen to the client and to watch her expression and behavior very carefully. This case study suggested that nurses should reconsider their practices to improve and to establish their original methods of nursing along with their clients.