1. Development and validation of a self-report for the assessment of adjustment disorders.
- Author
-
Einsle, Franziska, Köllner, Volker, Dannemann, Stephanie, and Maercker, Andreas
- Subjects
- *
PSYCHOLOGICAL adaptation , *AFFECTIVE disorders , *ANALYSIS of variance , *EXPERIMENTAL design , *FACTOR analysis , *CARDIAC patients , *RESEARCH methodology , *PSYCHOLOGICAL tests , *QUESTIONNAIRES , *SCALE items , *RESEARCH methodology evaluation - Abstract
Based on a recent diagnostic proposal for adjustment disorders a self-report assessment was developed. The current study reports validation results. Psychometric properties were examined using two different samples of 687 patients with cardiac arrhythmias and 86 patients from a psychosomatic outpatient clinic. Besides evaluating the internal structure and re-test reliability, associations with quality of life, general anxiety and depression, symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and coping strategies were analyzed. The factor analysis confirmed the three postulated factors: intrusion, avoidance and failure to adapt. The internal consistencies for these three scales were between α = 0.74 and 0.91. The re-rest reliability of the scales for a six-week period lay between rtt = 0.61 and 0.84. Medium-sized correlations were found between the scales with general anxiety and depression as well as posttraumatic stress disorder. Furthermore, the scales correlated with emotion-oriented and somewhat with proactive coping, but not with task-oriented or avoidance-oriented coping strategies. It is concluded that the self-report on adjustment disorders enables new possibilities to investigate further previously under-researched adjustment disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
- View/download PDF