Validating the Chinese Version of the Decision Fatigue Scale

Abstract

For Taiwan health care system, the rather new concept Shared decision making is a process which firstly put evidence based health practice, patient preference, and values together. Secondly, the health care personnel provide information, possible options to patients and finally make a mutual agreement on any given clinical situation. However, family caregivers must act as a surrogate if and when patients were unable to make decision. Nevertheless, for family caregivers, a simple decision about daily life could lead to another issues required another decision. The process of making series of decision could end up with feels of passive and meaningless which is defined as decision fatigue (Hickman, 2018). The decision fatigue could affect patients’ outcome. For example, In Taiwan, Family members are very stressful to make a decision to send a patient to a long-term institution, which may affect the patient's disease status. In order for patients who are unable to make their decision have optimistic health outcomes, it is important for health care provider to measure the level of decision fatigue among family caregivers. The Decision Fatigue Scale was crafted and validated with explored factor analysis on total of 101subjects by Hickman (2018). However, it never was applied in family givers among Asia population. The purpose of this preliminary study is to validate the validate the Chinese version of the Decision Fatigue Scale. The first step is to translate this measure. The translation to Chinese and translation back to English was processed. One item showed a discrepancy between the origin English version and the translation back to English version. The ambiguous on the word ＂someone else＂ in this particular item ＂Someone else should make decisions for me……＂. After communicating with the author, R. L. Hickman, PhD, RN, FAAN, the final decision on word choices of Chinese was made. After the approved from the Institution Review Board(IRB) from Regional hospital in middle Taiwan, total of 100 family caregivers will invited to participated into this study between August and October. Exploratory Factor Analysis and Internal Consistency will be applied to validate this measure. The results will expect to provide the scientific evidence on how to measure decision fatigue on Taiwanese Family Caregivers in long-term care facilities.