The literature suggests that peer support is protective of
relapse for adults treated for substance-use disorder. However, to our
knowledge there is no standard measure of peer support. Therefore, the purpose
of this research was to use Rasch analysis to assess a 13-item peer support
scale used in a group of adults treated for primary psychoactive
substance-abuse disorder. The participants (n = 408) are adults who were
discharged from an inpatient substance-abuse treatment program from five
successive years, 2004-2009. Overall, it is acceptable to surmise that items
1-12 are part of the same dimension for the 13-item scale. Given the prominence
of therapeutic communities as a mode of primary treatment and the importance of
peer support, it is important to both the academic and treatment communities to
have a standard way to measure peer support. The scale presented here can be
useful for this purpose.
We asses a peer support scale for those treated for
substance abuse.We examine characteristics of the peer support scale.We provide
an option to measure peer support for those treated for substance abuse.
The psychometric properties of the instrument showed that
the person reliability score is low (0.50); however, increasing the length of
the test could potentially enhance the person reliability score. Another
noteworthy finding is that it is clear from the infit and outfit coefficients
that item 13 exhibits a high degree of variation from the model prediction than
is commonly accepted. Similarly, the exact match measures
indicate a high degree of randomness. Given the questionable face validity of
the item to treatment success and failure, it would be appropriate to recode
item 13 or potentially remove it all together. Doing so will almost certainly
improve the reliability statistics for the extreme and nonextreme measures.
This finding caused us to look back in the literature and it is unclear if
having friends that go to substance-abuse treatment is either protective or not
for relapse. Therefore, the results show that it is hard to tell how to code
item 13 and it may need to be coded differently.
Another improvement that could be made to the scale would be
to collapse categories 2 and 3 or to collapse categories 3 and 4. This would
eliminate three of the four disordered categories and potentially enhance the
usability of the scale.
Additionally, participants had some difficulty
differentiating between the choices rarely and sometimes.
In the future, the scale should have clearer definitions for response
categories and should include specific periods for the items (ie, the number of
times in a month or within a certain period of time). By giving better anchors
to the descriptions of the response categories, the observed average statistic
orderings could be enhanced...
Full article at: http://goo.gl/lZqIrZ
By:
- 1College of Health and Human Sciences, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA.
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