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Based on his experience with the Menninger Psychotherapy Project, Wallerstein has constructed a new method to assess structural change in psychotherapy, Scales of Psychological Capacities (SPC). The present study is an account of the first reliability study of the SPC. Two designs were used and in both designs subjects were psychiatric inpatients with severe psychiatric illnesses. In the “Cases' design,” two judges independently assessed a sample of twenty-nine videotaped structural interviews. The internal consistency of the SPC based on all items was .84, estimated with Cron-bach's alpha. The internal consistency of the three subscales was acceptable, but leaves room for improvements. The interrater reliability, estimated with ICC (1,1) was generally found to be acceptable (.64) with the limited amount of training provided for the
This work was supported with a grant from The Swedish Council of Social Research (SFR) to Bengt-Åke Armelius and Eva Sundin. It is part of a research project; The Treatment Home Evaluation Project which receives grants from The Tricentennial Fund of the Bank of Sweden to Bengt-Åke Armelius.
judges. The agreement between clinical judges was further studied in the second design, the “Judges' design,” where sixteen judges independently rated a single clinical interview with a psychotic patient. Interrater reliability estimated with ICC (1,1) was found to be .65, i.e., approximately the same as the result of “Cases' design.” In order to improve the measurement quality of the SPC it seems necessary to design an interview specifically for the SPC ratings. The conclusion of the study is that the SPC has the potential to become a clinical rating scale for measuring structural change as a complement to symptomatic change in psychotherapy research.