Chang, S.

Causal attributions of mental illness have received substantial attention given their influence on help-seeking patterns of individuals and the level of engagement with health services. Few studies, however, have examined caregivers’ perspectives of their relatives’ illness. The current study aimed to examine caregivers’ causal attributions of their relatives’ mental illness and its association with perceived stigma in a multi-ethnic Asian sample. Primary caregivers (N = 350) of psychiatric outpatients were recruited from a psychiatric hospital.

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly aware of the importance of the information needs of informal carers. However, little research has investigated their information needs comprehensively within the lived experience of being an informal carer. This paper presents a taxonomy of information needs of informal carers that assists in understanding their information needs more fully.

The aim of this article is to describe the development and initial validation of an instrument for comprehensively identifying the information needs state of individuals who performed the role of informal carers. This study used two phases: a qualitative phase for the generation and review of an item pool (data collected from nine informal carers) and a quantitative phase (data collected from 198 informal carers) for items reduction and evaluation through exploratory factor analysis, and assessed validity and reliability.

There is not only a lack of research that conceptualises the information needs of informal carers but also a shortage in research that addresses those needs from the perspective of information systems in the health care system. This shortage of systematic and conceptualised research on information needs of informal carers often prohibits the information providers and developers from knowing what types of information informal carers need to support their roles and tasks as carers and to evaluate how well they are fulfilling the information needs of informal carers.