Publication Date

12-1982

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Richard Miller, Sam McFarland, John O'Connor

Degree Program

Department of Psychology

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

In keeping with increasing national demands on organizations to demonstrate effectiveness of mental health services for the chronically mentally ill (CMI) across the nation, Barren River Mental Health/Mental Retardation (BR MH/MR) undertook an assessment of programs which provide services to this population. This necessitated the employment of a client outcome measure to determine the effectiveness of these programs and services to the CMI's. After an extensive perusal of the instruments currently available, a decision was made to construct a new assessment instrument in a behaviorally anchored rating scale format to meet the unique needs of BR MH/MR. Prior to the development of this measure, the staff was using only a global index of client functioning. The initial utilization of this new scale which contained 29 items involved a purely descriptive analyses of client caseloads. The administration changed its focus to a utility analysis which necessitated the establishment of the scale's psychometric properties. Content-oriented test construction, i.e. content validity, was substantiated through the scale's developmental process and the inclusion of the therapists who would later be using the measure in the process of construction. An original sample of CMI clients (n=86) provided a set of ratings upon which principal component factor analysis and stepwise multiple regression procedures were computed. These analyses yielded five meaningful factors within the items of the new instrument. The results of these analyses were also used to construct three videotape interviews upon which indices of inter-rater reliability were computed (n=21). Internal consistency correlations were computed on the two samples yielding values for the dependent measures ranging from .605 to .958. Inter-rater reliabilities ranged from .048 to .87. The client outcome measure with the global measure provided minimal psychometric evidence for convergent validity. Within the client outcome measure, analyses indicated that 19 out of 29 items provided the best psychometric set as a total scale, while the inclusion of the other 10 items may be warranted for descriptive clinical information.

Disciplines

Psychology | Social and Behavioral Sciences

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