The purpose of this study was to develop and psychometrically test a patient-oriented, theory-based questionnaire to capture the communication preferences of chronically ill adolescents in provider-patient interaction. In a qualitative prestudy, patients were asked to express their preferences in focus groups. From those results and relying on previous research findings, we generated questionnaire items and in a second pretest, examined them in 1-to-1 cognitive interviews for comprehensibility and acceptance. The resultant questionnaire was then psychometrically tested in the main study on 423 chronically ill inpatient adolescents aged 12 to 17 years in 14 rehabilitation clinics in Germany. Numerous preferences were extractable from the focus-group interviews and transferred into 106 Items. Psychometric testing of the questionnaire resulted in 3 scales encompassing 27 items. These we describe as the emotional-affective communication component (EAC), instrumental communication component (IC), and adolescent-specific communication component (ASC). Confirmatory factor analysis revealed the scales EAC und IC to be good to very good, and the ASC scale as satisfactory regarding unidimensionality. The participants gave the questionnaire high marks for comprehensibility, acceptance, and relevance. The 3 scales' Cronbach's alpha falls between .78 and .92. A questionnaire with 27 items is now available for application as a psychometrically tested and simple-to-use measuring instrument. Research is still needed concerning the generalizability to other patient groups (e.g., the acutely ill or outpatients) and whether it can be tailored for use by different types of care providers or to accommodate the communication preferences of parents.
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