Iowa Measurement and Research Foundation Summary of Activities
Respectfully Submitted by Jacob B. Priest, Ph.D.

Project Title: Developing a Brief Measure of Family Functioning for Use in Primary Care

This report will briefly outline the summary of activities for the IMRF grant I received for my project, Developing a Brief Measure of Family Functioning for Use in Primary Care. The goal of this project was twofold. The first was to determine the amount of information provided by questions from commonly used measures of family functioning. The second was to develop a brief, accurate measure of family functioning uses questions that provide the most amount of information that could be use in a primary care setting. In order to create a brief measure of family functioning for those in primary care, the goal of this project was to evaluate 3 commonly used measures of family functioning using an Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis. The goal of this project was to use IRT to identify items within these measures that provided the most amount of information and use them to create a new brief measure.

For this project, I was able to recruit 857 people to begin the survey. Of those, more than 60% (n=520) responded to a sufficient amount of the questions to be used in the analysis. The IRT analysis was able to successfully identify 9 items from the measure used that provided large amounts of information. The amount of information from these items was used to create a brief measure, and this measure was compared to subscales of the original measures.

The results of this analysis have been written up and a manuscript entitled “An Item Response Theory Evaluation of Family Functioning Measure for Use in Primary Care” was the submitted to the Journal of Family Psychology in October, 2015. Additionally, I have submitted the results of this project to be presented at the annual American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Conference in Indianapolis, IN in September of 2016.

At present, I am currently working on another analysis based on the responses gathered from this project. Specifically, using latent class analysis, I have analyzed the data to show that depending on who respondents were thinking about when completing the measures of family functioning can affect the clinical cutoffs and the reliability of the measures. My goal is to complete the goal the manuscript and submit for publication in the spring of this. Additionally, I plan to submit this project as a presentation for the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Conference in 2017.