Past Issues

Objectives: To develop a caregiver version of the original Personal and Social
Performance (PSP) Scale, a scale which is widely used by psychiatric clinical
professionals to provide caregivers with a method for assessing personal and social
functioning changes in patients with schizophrenia. Methods: The pre-test
questionnaire, which was completed after modifying the initial draft in accordance
with an expert validity review, is divided into the fi rst part containing the personal
and social functioning scale, and the second part having basic information. The
pre-test subjects consisted of 200 primary caregivers who were caring for clinic
outpatients with schizophrenia. All of the obtained pre-test information was subjected
to item analysis, validity testing, and reliability testing. Results: The factor
analysis results for each factor revealed that the variances were between 53.46%
and 73.42%, and that Cronbach’s α of the reliability test was 0.91. The test-retest
reliability and inter-rater reliability of the newly developed scale were 0.89 and
0.91, respectively, showing that the validity and reliability of the scale were satisfactory.
Conclusions: The caregiver version of the PSP in Chinese developed in
this study contains 20 questions distributed among four domains, i.e., socially useful
activities, personal and social relationships, self-care, and disturbing and aggressive
behavior.