A Validation and Replication Study of the Patient-Generated Measure PSYCHLOPS on an Icelandic Clinical Population

Abstract

PSYCHLOPS (Psychological Outcome Profiles; Ashworth et al., 2004) is a patient-generated outcome measure developed to be a sensitive indicator of change after therapy. It requires the patient to choose which symptoms or problems are most important to measure over the course of therapy. The present study replicates previous findings for the original version and validates the Icelandic version. The psychometric properties of PSYCHLOPS were investigated by comparing it to an established nomothetic outcome measure, CORE-OM. Icelandic versions of both questionnaires were administered to patients attending cognitive behavior group therapy in a mental-health setting in Iceland. PSYCHLOPS was found to be considerably more sensitive to change over therapy than CORE-OM; convergent and concurrent validity was supported, and internal reliabilities were satisfactory. The acceptability of the instrument was demonstrated by the high completion rate. Overall, these findings suggest that the Icelandic version of PSYCHLOPS has good psychometric properties, and the findings compared very favorably to previous findings. It is concluded that PSYCHLOPS should be considered a desirable instrument for evaluating mental-health outcome and a valuable complement to conventional nomothetic outcome measures.