Methods for Measuring Adjustment and Social Behavior in the Community: I. Rationale, Description, Discriminative Validity and Scale Development

Abstract

The development of a set of inventories for objectively assessing the adjustment and social behavior of pre-psychotic and ex-hospital patients in the community is described. The underlying rationale and the operational criteria for the scales are presented, along with the results of several studies having to do with their discriminative validity in a follow-up study, the development of the separate measures of adjustment and social behavior, the internal consistencies, and the stability of the measures across populations. The major characteristics of the scales are their reliance on both the patient and a relative in measuring social behavior, the use of a relative as a direct reporter, and the establishment of his reliability in describing patient behavior. The scales have been designed for application to the problems of describing and classifying patients in accordance with their behavior prior to entrance to the hospital and in the community follow-up evaluation and comparison of psychiatric treatments.