A Smartphone Application of "Family Connections" to Relatives of People With Borderline Personality Disorder.

A Smartphone Application of "Family Connections" to Relatives of People With Borderline Personality Disorder.

A Smartphone Application of "Family Connections" to Increase the Use of Skills and the Improving of Psychological Symptoms in Relatives of People With Borderline Personality Disorder: a Protocol Study for a Randomized Controlled Trial.

The aims of our study are the following: (a) testing the effectiveness of a combined intervention: "Family Connections" program with a smartphone app versus the same intervention supported by a paper-based manual, (b) studying the feasibility and acceptance of both conditions and (c) evaluating the perceptions and opinions of families about both interventions.

Family members of patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) often experience high levels of suffering, anxiety, stress, burden and helplessness. The treatment program with the most empirical support is "Family Connections". It is one of the first programs specifically designed to help relatives of patients with BPD. The program is an adaptation of multiple strategies of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. The results of these studies and their subsequent replications showed an improvement in family attitudes and perceived burden. Two of the technologies with very promising developments are Ecological Momentary Assessment and Ecological Momentary Intervention, that can act on each other. A large number of smartphone apps for people with psychological problems focus on the provision of instructions, adaptive self-help strategies, alarms, electronic diaries or emotional state ratings. The Family Connections app proposed in this article consists of a smartphone app built using EMA and EMI technologies.The aims of our study are the following: (a) testing the effectiveness of a combined intervention: "Family Connections" program with a smartphone app versus the same intervention supported by a paper-based manual, (b) studying the feasibility and acceptance of both conditions and (c) evaluating the perceptions and opinions of families about both interventions.

Family members in the experimental group of this study will receive an ecological momentary intervention (EMI) derived from an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) via the Family Connections smartphone app.

Family members in this condition will receive the manual of Family Connections which contains all the information on the program sessions conducted and the skills training strategies in writing.

Family members in the experimental group of this study will receive an ecological momentary intervention (EMI) derived from an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) via the Family Connections smartphone app. Family members in this condition will receive the manual of Family Connections which contains all the information on the program sessions conducted and the skills training strategies in writing.

Burden Assessment Scale (BAS) consists of 19 items and it assess the caregivers' objective and subjective burden within the past six months. Items are rated on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from 1(nothing) to 4 (a lot), and higher values indicate stronger burden. Internal reliability of the scale ranged from .89 to .91 and it shows adequated validity (Reinhard, Gubman, Horwitz & Minsky, 1994).

Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) have 42 items about negative emotional symptoms (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995). Lovibond & Lovinbod (1995) proposed that a part of these subscales for can become part of a short version creating a new questionnaire of 21 items. Items are rated on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (It did not happen to me) to 3 (It happened to me a lot or most of the time), and higher scores indicate worse symptoms of depression, anxiety or stress. DASS-21 showed fantastic factor structures. Regarding to the internal consistency, Cronbach's alphas were excellent for the DASS-21 subscales: Depression (α = .94), Anxiety (α = .87) and Stress (α = .91) (Antony, Bieling, Cox, Enns & Swinson, 1998).

Family Empowerment Scale (FES) consists of 34 items divided in three subscales: family, service system, and involvement in community that is refered to three ways of empowerment, attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors (Koren, DeChillo & Friesen, 1992). Items are rated on a scale of 1 (completely false) to 5 (totally true), and higher scores indicate a greater sense of empowerment. The psychometric properties are the following: regarding to the internal consistency of FES subscores, the coefficients ranged from .87 to .88 and validity and reliability are adequated (Koren, DeChillo & Friesen, 1992).

Connor-Davidson Resilience scale is a 25-item measure of resilience. Items are rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (absolutely not) to 4 (almost always) and the punctuation is based on how the participant has felt over the last month. Higher scores means greater resilience (Connor & Davidson, 2003). The CD-RISC authors reported acceptable test-retest reliability (r = 0.87) and strong internal consistency (α = .89) (Connor & Davidson, 2003).

It consists of 10 items measured with a Likert scale with five response options from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree. It is reliable (coefficient alpha of .91) and useful (Bangor, Kortum, & Miller, 2008).

Inclusion Criteria: Having a family member diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Being 18 years of age or older. Knowing and understanding the Spanish language. Having a smartphone with Internet connection. Completing the informed consent.

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