Assessing the health of family (the term family is used here very broadly to cover any partnership [spouse, child, lover and friend] within which consistent care is provided for the chronically ill individual), caregivers of people with chronic illnesses and ultimately intervening to support them and maintain their health status are an issue that will prove to be of utmost importance in health care over the next decade. Chronic illnesses, as a group, make up the largest health problem facing the western world (Mast 1995). In fact, Miller (1992) described the chronic illness as a phenomenon of the 20th century. As more diseases are controlled through medical intervention, there is an increase in survival; there is also a consequential increase in disability and a corresponding need for long-term care provision. No health system is able to sustain the cost of providing ongoing care for the chronically ill by qualified health professionals, so the burden of care falls on the patient and his/her family. The burden of care is different for family caregivers compared with formal caregivers such as nurses, doctors and other health professionals; the family caregiver is more likely to have an emotional investment in the patient’s wellbeing and faces the loss of an active spouse or parent and the consequent changes in relationship and role as well as the increased care demands as the patient becomes more dependent over time (Kinsella et al. 1998, Meyers & Grey 2001). Whereas, for health professionals, caregiving provides work that is paid and is indeed what they are there for, family caregivers gain additional workload, which increases financial strain on top of the physical and emotional demands. Whereas health professionals can go home at the end of the day and can anticipate things to do and enjoy which are different from work activities, the family caregiver has no such respite from caregiving tasks and demands. Furthermore, family caregiving is as complex as the families that are involved. The physical health of family members is only one aspect of the jigsaw in ensuring the quality of care for the chronically ill patient. Family function (or dysfunction) is also an important factor, which is intimately related to the mental health of family members along with additional financial, time and leisure constraints (Kinsella et al. 1998). An unspoken assumption of the health system’s shifting of the cost and burden of care into the community is that the family caregivers themselves are healthy and able to provide the care. In fact, this assumption is apparent in Schneider’s research where the author states that the caregivers are a non-medical population. This may not in fact be the case. Caregivers are very often elders themselves providing care for their older spouse or middle-aged children providing care for ageing parents. In fact, Desbiens et al. (2001), in a study of more than 1200 caregivers, found the typical family caregiver to be female and over 50 years old. In Schneider’s research, the average age of the caregivers was 62.2 years; there was no indication as to the sex of the respondents. Given the age of these caregivers, it is likely that they would have their own diagnoses of chronic illness and consequently some related fatigue (Toseland et al. 1995). The ability to differentiate the fatigue associated with caregiving and the fatigue related to the caregiver’s own chronic illnesses is not easy, nor is it necessarily required, but one cannot assume that all fatigue is related to caregiving alone. As this is a methodological paper focusing on the psychometrics on the Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS), Schneider does not include a full description of either the sample demographics or their responses on the fatigue questionnaire. Correspondence: Davina Porock, Professor of Nursing Practice, School of Nursing, The University of Nottingham, UK. E-mail: davina.porock@nottingham.ac.uk