Associate professor University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, Hawaii
Within efforts to improve the quality of mental health care through the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based practices, scholars have continued to suggest and encourage the implementation of measurement-based care. Indeed, measurement-based care has demonstrated significant improvement in treatment outcomes when compared to usual care (Lewis et al., 2019), along with other advantages such as reducing biases from clinical judgement. Despite its established importance in the field, evidence-based assessment tends to be understudied as compared to evidence-based treatment (Beidas et al., 2014), potentially resulting in the use of measures that may not be psychometrically reliable or valid, or a tendency to use less research-driven/systematic approaches to assessment. Adding to this difficulty in public mental health settings, barriers such as purchasing costs and administration burden often impede implementation of measurement-based care. Thus, in addition to advancing evidence-based treatments into community settings, it is also crucial in promoting the use of low-cost, brief, reliable, and valid evidence-based measurement strategies. The focus of this project centers on examining the utility of a free multi-informant four-item measure of hopefulness (i.e., Ohio Scales Hopefulness scale; Ogles et al., 2004), a construct that has received little attention but is potentially very important for youth and caregiver wellness, within a large statewide public mental health care system. Collectively, the six aims of this study (done for both youth- and caregiver-report versions) examined the measure’s (a) factor structure, (b) internal consistency, and (c) sensitivity to change. Additionally, we examined (d) the relationship between youth- and caregiver-reported hopefulness, as well as (e) the measure’s relationships with numerous domains of psychopathology (e.g., depression, anxiety, delinquency) and (f) functioning. As a whole, the study found good factor structure, acceptable internal consistency, sensitivity to change over time and significant relationships with youth mental health problems and functioning. Using a sample consisting of approximately 1,000 youths receiving public mental health services, the constellation of my findings demonstrates potential for this four-item measure of hopefulness to be a useful, efficient, and cost-effective tool with ethnically diverse samples, which are substantially different from primarily White samples included in previous studies of hopefulness.
