Abstract
The Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) is an interview-based instrument designed to elicit information from an informal caregiver to evaluate behavioral disturbances in persons with dementia. Minor modifications of this instrument have produced the Neuropsychiatric Inventory-Nursing Home version (NPI-NH), a version specifically designed for interviewing professional care facility staff. The purpose of this investigation is to further understand the psychometric properties of the NPI-NH by examining its reliability, validity, and factor structure in an elderly neuropsychiatric population. Participants were 204 elderly inpatients from a large provincial neuropsychiatric hospital in British Columbia, Canada. Data were collected as part of a patient needs assessment project. The internal consistency reliability of the NPI-NH was alpha=0.67. An exploratory principal axis analysis with varimax rotation revealed five factors that accounted for 63.2% of the variance. These factors reflect aspects of psychiatric disturbance associated with: (a) Agitation; (b) Mood; (c) Psychosis; (d) Sleep/Motor Activity; and (e) Elevated Behavior. Convergent and discriminant validity of the five factors by correlating them with other behavioral measures was considered satisfactory. These results provide support for the clinical use of the NPI-NH as a screen for neuropsychiatric symptoms in an elderly neuropsychiatric population. However, additional research is encouraged to further evaluate the clinical utility of the NPI-NH in nursing home and inpatient geriatric settings.
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