Objectives: The purpose of this study was to develop a Family Visit Scale for Dementia (FAVS-D) measuring the quality of visits between nursing home residents with dementia and their family members. Design: Scale development using a two step process based on survey data. Setting: One Veterans Administration and eleven community nursing homes. Participants: One hundred and fifteen family members visiting residents with dementia. Measurements: Responses to a preliminary scale of 41 items, developed from a qualitative study, and responses to a 15 item scale, generated from the preliminary scale by eliminating items that were answered "does not apply" by a significant number of family members and by sequential iterations that removed items with low or high item total correlations or with responses item-item correlations. Questionnaires were anonymously completed by family members after visit with a relative with dementia. Results: Final FAVS-D has 14 item after eliminating 1 question that family members considered confusing. The mean score of FAVS-D was 18.7 + 6.6 (mean + SD) with a range of -10 to 28. After leaving out one outlier value, the distribution of FAVS-D score was not different from normal distribution. Reliability coefficient alpha for FAVS-D was 0.77. The factor analysis produced 4 factors: factor 1 (7 items, ? =.82) related to nursing staff interaction with residents and visitors, factor 2 (4 items, ? =.73) related to meaningfulness of the visit, factor 3 (2 items, ? =.85) related to cleanliness and factor 4 (1 item) related to the connection established between the visitor and the resident. There was a significant difference between total FAVS-D scores of two facilities that provided most of the questionnaires. Subscores for nursing staff and meaningfulness factors in these two facilities were also significantly different, while subscores for cleanliness and connection were similar. Conclusions: This study indicates that it is possible to measure family visit satisfaction. The most important factors of FAVS-D, are factor 1 related to nursing staff activity and explaining 25% of variance, and factor 2 related to meaningfulness of the visit and explaining 16% of variance. When the facility staff becomes more involved with families of their residents and helps them make visit more meaningful, the families feel more satisfied with the visits.
