Staff ratings of occupational engagement among people with severe mental illness – psychometric properties of a screening tool in the day center context

BACKGROUND: Staff who plan and organize day center activities may need to observe the attendees’ performance and progression. This led us to develop a tool for that purpose, termed General Occupational Engagement in people with Severe mental illness (GOES). The aim was to investigate its psychometric properties in terms of factor structure, internal consistency, corrected item-total correlations (CITC), convergent and discriminant validity, and test-retest stability. METHODS: Ninety-three day center attendees were assessed by the GOES and instruments addressing constructs hypothesized to be either similar to (activity level, motivation for day center attendance, perceptions of the worker role, hours spent in the day center) or divergent from the GOES (attendees’ ratings of engagement in specified occupations, self-rated health, psychosocial functioning, psychiatric symptoms). A second sample of 41 attendees were included for the test-retest analysis. Exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach’s alpha analysis, Pearson correlations and paired-samples t-tests were performed. RESULTS: Exploratory factor analysis indicated one factor, which was in line with the intentions of the scale. The alpha value was 0.85 and all CITC were above 0.30. The tests for convergent validity resulted in correlations ranging between 0.23 and 0.47, most of which were moderately strong and mainly confirmed the hypotheses. Discriminant validity was clearly indicated, since all correlations with the selected constructs were <0.20. GOES also showed preliminary test-retest stability (r = 0.32). CONCLUSIONS: The GOES is ready for use in rehabilitation services and research where productive and other types of activities are of interest. It may serve as an important supplement to attendees’ self-reported occupational engagement.