Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access originally published online on March 6, 2007
Schizophrenia Bulletin 2007 33(6):1364-1372; doi:10.1093/schbul/sbm014
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Development of a Brief Scale of Everyday Functioning in Persons with Serious Mental Illness
2 Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA
3 Department of Psychiatry, Mt Sinai School of Medicine, New York
4 Department of Veterans Affairs VISN 22 MIRECC
1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0680; tel: 858-534-3354, fax: 858-534-7723, e-mail: tpatterson{at}ucsd.edu.
We developed and tested the validity of a brief scale to assess everyday functioning in persons with serious mental illness. A sample of 434 adults with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder were administered the University of California, San Diego, Performance-Based Skills Assessment (UPSA), which assesses functional skills in 5 areas of life functioning (eg, finances and planning). Through use of factor analysis, we developed the UPSA-Brief, which consists of 2 subscales (communication and financial) from the original UPSA. UPSA-Brief scores were correlated with cognitive functioning, symptoms of psychosis, age, and education. We further tested the sensitivity and specificity of the UPSA-Brief for predicting residential independence using receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Finally, sensitivity to change was assessed through comparison of 2 interventions for improving UPSA-Brief scores. UPSA-Brief scores were highly correlated with scores on the full version of the UPSA (r = .91), with overall cognitive functioning (r = .57), and with negative symptoms (r = –.32). The discriminant validity of the UPSA-Brief was adequate (ROC area under the curve [AUC] = 0.73; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.67–0.78), with greatest dichotomization for the UPSA-Brief at a cutoff score of 60. The UPSA-Brief was significantly better than the Dementia Rating Scale, Positive and Negative Syndromes Scale positive, and Positive and Negative Syndromes Scale negative at predicting residential independence (all P values < .05). Participants receiving a behavioral intervention also improved significantly compared with a support condition (P = .023). The UPSA-Brief has adequate psychometric properties, predicts residential independence, is sensitive to change, and requires only 10–15 minutes to administer. Therefore, the UPSA-Brief may be a useful performance-based functional outcome scale.
Keywords: functional capacity / schizophrenia / independence / psychotherapy
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  R. W. Heinrichs, N. Ammari, A. A. Miles, and S. McDermid Vaz Cognitive Performance and Functional Competence as Predictors of Community Independence in Schizophrenia Schizophr Bull, July 30, 2008; (2008) sbn095v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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