The development of an assessment of social perception for people with schizophrenia

Hsin-yu Chiang

Fu-Jen Catholic University, Taiwan

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Neurol Disord

Abstract :

Social perception (SP) is an ability to identify the rules, roles, and context in situations. SP has shown to associate with functional outcomes in people with schizophrenia and become a target of intervention. However, the currently-available measures of SP has two limitations: 1) most SP measures were developed decades ago, which makes some items out-of-date; and 2) the scoring of these SP measures may have been affected by examineeâ?? gender, but such impacts have not been controlled. The objectives are: 1) to create an up-to-date assessment for SP (ASP), and 2) to control the impacts of gender on scoring. We developed the ASP based on its definition. We used Rasch analysis to calibrate the item difficulties and differential item functioning of sex (DIF of sex) of these SP items. The misfit items (infit or outfit mean square ≥ 1.4) and DIF items (DIF value ≥ 0.38) would be removed. A total of 236 patients were recruited in this study. After deleting the 7 DIF items (no misfit item was found), the remaining 26 items showed acceptable model fits (infit MNSQ = 0.90â??1.14; outfit MNSQ = 0.79–1.22), supporting its construct validity. In addition, the removal of DIF items means the control of the impacts of gender on scoring, suggesting that the ASP can provide un-biased assessments for both genders. The distribution of item difficulties could cover the range of the patients’SP levels (i.e., difference between the adjacent item difficulties was < 0.39), indicating that the ASP can be used in patients with various SP levels. The average Rasch reliability of these SP items were 0.68, suggesting the acceptable reliability. Our results reveal that the ASP serves as a reliable and valid assessment.

Biography :

Hsin-yu Chiang has completed her PhD at the age of 29 years from Boston University. She is an associate professor in Fu-Jen Catholic University. She has published more than 25 papers in international journals and has been serving as an editorial board member of different journal.

E-mail: ariel.hychiang@gmail.com