ABSTRACTAs institutionalised psychogeriatric patients are very vulnerable, a pilot project was undertaken to develop an instrument to evaluate the quality of their care. The proposed instrument is based on qualitative findings from observations, interviews, records and literature review. It focuses on individual patients, groups of patients, families and the unit, and includes nine items which are measured in terms of administrative, affective and instrumental aspects of care. This paper only describes the data gathered on one of these foci—the involvement of families as both providers of care and as clients requiring support. From the data it appears that the family role as a provider of care is enhanced by support received from the staff and, therefore, family support was selected as an item by which to evaluate quality of care. Material from the data was used as examples for assigning quantitative values to aspects of family involvemen