Congress Abstracts 2006

224

THE BREAST CANCER TREATMENT RESPONSE INVENTORY. Frances Cartwright, RN, PhD, AOCN^®, the Valley Hospital, Paramus, NJ; Carol N. Hoskins, PhD, RN, FAAN, College of Nursing, New York University, New York, NY; and Wendy C. Budin, PhD, RN, BC, College of Nursing, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NY.

There is a need for an instrument that conceptualizes and operationalizes the three dimensions of the breast cancer symptom experience: number of symptoms (NOS), severity of symptoms (SOS), and amount of distress experienced (ADE), so that interventions can be toward specific concerns that women report throughout the diagnostic, treatment, recovery and ongoing recovery.

To describe development and psychometric properties of the Breast Cancer Treatment Response Inventory (BCTRI) (Hoskins, 1990; Budin and Hoskins, 2000; Cartwright- Alcarese, 2005), an instrument designed to measure symptom experience from treatment through ongoing recovery.

Components of Stress and Coping Theory (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) and the Symptom Experience Model (Dodd, et al., 2001 provided a framework for symptom experience that incorporates three interacting dimensions: NOS, SOS, and ADE.

The BCTRI, a Likert-type self-report instrument lists symptoms common from treatment through ongoing recovery, and provides scores for NOS, SOS and ADE. Descriptive, correlational, and factor analysis were used to establish psychometric properties of the BCTRI. Validity for side effects on the BCTRI was supported through a literature review and verified by a CNS and a statistician. Principal components factor analysis supported a 5-factor solution accounting for 68% of the variance. Using the BCTRI, a descriptive, survey design was used to collect data from 105 women at three phases of treatment, i.e., post-surgical, adjuvant therapy, and ongoing recovery (Budin & Hoskins, 2000), and was used to examine symptom experience of 131 women in early and ongoing recovery (Cartwright - Alcarese, 2005). Participants for both of these studies were selected from practices of physicians in the NY/NJ Metropolitan area. Reliability for the three dimensions of symptom experience was evident in Cronbach alpha coefficients of .64, .77, and .72, and .72, .82, and .84 respectively.