Please cite this article as: Antoine P, Quandalle S, Christophe V, Vivre avec un proche malade :évaluation des dimensions positive et négative de l'expérience des aidants naturels, Annales medio-psychologiques (2008), doi:10.1016/j.amp.2007.06.012 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. AbstractThe growing prevalence of chronic diseases and the greater reliance on outpatient care have shifted the demands from professional caregivers towards natural caregivers. Patients and their family members are based in their homes with complicated therapies to administer. Since a natural caregiver is a key to home care, if the burden becomes too great, the home care support may be threatened. Subjective burden aims to refer to the embarrassment or role overload that may be experienced when giving care at home. Caregivers can experience an alteration in their psychological and physical health due to the new situation. Health care professionals need to be aware of these problems, and they need instruments to assess the impact on the natural caregivers.There has been a growing interest on the part of researchers over the past thirty years in exploring and in developing methodologically sound instruments to measure the caregiving experience.Researchers and clinicians involved in these projects have come from a wide spectrum of medical and psychological domains, including psychiatry, gerontology, psycho-oncology, and somatic medicine. A number of instruments may be appropriate, but while many of these instruments have individual strengths and weaknesses two instruments deserve to be recommended. More specifically, one of these is Given and Given's Caregiver Reaction Assessment (CRA) which was correctly developed and tested, and contains the most areas of interest. The authors are experts in the field, and their instrument has been used satisfactorily by other researchers. The CRA was developed and tested in a study conducted among caregivers of patients with various disorders and this study revealed excellent psychometric properties. The original English version of the CRA Page 3 of 26 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 3 was translated into French by six researchers. Each made his own translation. These translations were compared and a consensus was reached for each of the 24 items. A professional translator retranslated the French version into English and a discussion on minor differences led to the final version of the French CRA. The translated CRA is expected to have the same structure as that found for the original instrument or other translated forms (Nijboer et al., 1999). This article addresses the ...

No abstract