The relative utility of four abridged versions of the Zarit Burden interview

In recent years, various abridged versions of Zarit's Burden Interview have been devised to facilitate screening and detection of distress among those who provide informal care to persons with dementia. The psychometric properties of responses to four such measures are compared, with data derived from a sample of 503 caregivers recruited as part of a longitudinal Canadian study of dementia prevalence and patterns of care. Analyses of the item content, internal consistency, factor structure, and concurrent validity suggest that responses to the 12-item brief burden measure by Hébert and colleagues would appear to possess optimal psychometric properties as compared to others. It's of note, however, that the differences between three of the four scales are not substantial. Only the 14-item measure proposed by Knight and colleagues appears to be suboptimal. The results of this study can be generalized given the representative and national composition of the study sample.