The association of positive and negative events with depressive symptomatology among caregivers.

A pilot study of eighty-two caregivers was conducted in South Carolina in 1991 to identify positive and negative factors associated with caregiving. Through home visits, interviewers obtained data on a variety of physical and mental health measures, including two new scales designed to measure perceived "positive" and "negative" events that had occurred in the previous month. The Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale was used as a measure of depressive symptomatology. For the new scales, only items that were significantly correlated with depressive symptomatology (p < 0.01) were retained. The new "positive" event scale (8 items) and the new "negative" event scale (16 items) had alpha coefficients of 0.79 and 0.86, respectively. These scales may be useful to researchers in sorting out mediating factors related to the burden of caregiving and in providing points for intervention.