title: Development of a brief scale of everyday functioning in persons with serious mental illness.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0680, USA.
authors.forename: Brent T
authors.initials: BT
authors.lastname: Mausbach
authors.forename: Phillip D
authors.initials: PD
authors.lastname: Harvey
authors.forename: Sherry R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Goldman
authors.forename: Dilip V
authors.initials: DV
authors.lastname: Jeste
authors.forename: Thomas L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Patterson
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology*; D039721:Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012372:ROC Curve; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000453:epidemiology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires