Background: In Alzheimer's disease and related disorders (ADRD) research, common outcome measures include cognitive and functional impairment, as well as persons with mild cognitive impairment (pwMCI) and care partner self-reported mood and quality of life. Studies commonly analyze these measures separately, which potentially leads to issues of multiple comparisons and/or multicollinearity among measures while ignoring the latent constructs they may be measuring.
Objective: This study sought to examine the latent factor structure of a battery of 12-13 measures of domains mentioned above, used in a multicomponent behavioral intervention (The HABIT® program) for pwMCI and their partners.
Methods: Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) involved 214 pwMCI-partner pairs. Subsequent Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) used 730 pairs in both pre- and post-intervention conditions.
Results: EFA generated a three-factor model. Factors could be characterized as partner adjustment (29.9%), pwMCI adjustment (18.1%), and pwMCI impairment (12.8%). The subsequent CFA confirmed our findings, and the goodness-of-fit for this model was adequate in both the pre- (CFI = 0.937; RMSEA = 0.057, p = 0.089) and post-intervention (CFI = 0.942; RMSEA = 0.051, p = 0.430) groups.
Conclusion: Results demonstrated a stable factor structure across cohorts and intervention conditions suggesting that three broad factors may provide a straightforward and meaningful model to assess intervention outcome, at least during the MCI phase of ADRD.
Keywords: Behavioral intervention; caregiver burden; factor analysis; functional status; mild cognitive impairment.