Assessment of caring and its effects in young people: development of the multidimensional assessment of Caring activities checklist (MACA-YC18) and the positive and negative outcomes of caring questionnaire (PANOC-YC20) for young carers

Background Many children, adolescents and young people are involved in caring for parents,siblings, or other relatives who have an illness, disability, mental health problem or other need forcare or supervision. The aim was to develop two new instruments for use in research with youngcarers to assess caring activities and their psychological effects. Method Two studies are reported. In study 1, 410 young carers were recruited via The PrincessRoyal Trust for Carers database of UK projects and asked to complete an initial item pool of 42 and75 questionnaire items to assess caring activities and caring outcomes respectively. In study 2 afurther 124 young carers were recruited. Results Following exploratory principal components analysis in study 1, 18 items were chosen tocompose the Multidimensional Assessment of Caring Activities Checklist (MACA-YC18), and 20items chosen to compose the Positive and Negative Outcomes of Caring Scales (PANOC-YC20). Instudy 2, normative and convergent validity data on the two instruments are reported. Conclusion The MACA-YC18 is an 18-item self-report measure that can be used to provide anindex of the total amount of caring activity undertaken by the young person, as well as sixsub-scale scores for domestic tasks, household management, personal care, emotional care, siblingcare and financial/practical care. The PANOC-YC20 is a 20-item self-report measure that can be usedto provide an index of positive and negative outcomes of caring.