Development and validation of caregiver’s attitudes toward drug addict’s recovery scale

Caregiver’s attitudes toward recovery of their drug addicted loved one significantly influence their behavioral orientation toward recovery, adherence to treatment procedures, and sustainability of sobriety. There is, however, a lack of any scale for its assessment, and thus the present study aimed to develop and validate the caregiver’s attitudes toward drug addict’s recovery scale. In-depth interviews were conducted with caregivers (N = 17, Mage = 39.35), and interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to generate superordinate themes of beliefs, negative feelings, and active involvement toward recovery. The items for each theme were generated, and after content validity, a pool 44 items was obtained. The factor structure of the scale was determined on a sample of 284 caregivers (Mage = 39.57), resulting in four subscales (i.e., negative recovery expectations, positive recovery expectations, emotional resentment, therapeutic pessimism) explaining 49.01% variance. The construct validity was assessed through confirmatory factor analysis (N = 400, Mage = 43.38), demonstrating good indices of fit for 42 out of 44 items. The convergent and discriminant validity of the retained item pool with scores on internalized stigma demonstrated a significant positive correlation with negative recovery expectations, emotional resentment, and therapeutic pessimism, whereas there was no correlation with positive recovery expectations. The reliability coefficients for subscales ranged from 0.77 to 0.92. The caregiver’s attitudes toward drug addict’s recovery scale is thus a psychometrically sound tool for the assessment of caregiver’s attitudes toward drug addict’s recovery in Pakistan.