Research Measures

Behavioral outcomes: It is generally a primary treatment goal to help individuals’ reduce behaviors/challenging behaviors that negatively impact their quality of life, community access, and personal freedom. Examples include decreases in: aggression, self-injury, sexual misconduct, property destruction, hospitalizations, ER visits, and arrests. It is also helpful to track increases in adaptive behaviors such as days of employment and increased participation in community activities. As individuals improve intrinsic self-regulation skills, levels of supervision and use of medications may decline; monitoring supervision ratios and numbers of medications will be distal factors that may take longer to be statistically significant. Although, various psychometric evaluation tools are useful, actual evidence that more adaptive skills are being generalized into an individual’s life are the strongest indicators.

Carer and self-report measures:

• World Health Organization: Disability Assessment Schedule (WHODAS 2.0)
• Emotion Regulation Knowledge Scale (ERKS)
• Behavior Problem Inventory (BPI)
• Aberrant Behavior Checklist (ABC)
• WHOQOL-BREF: World Health Organization Quality of Life Scale – Brief version (World Health Organization, 1997)
• Acr’s Self Determination Scale
• Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWL; Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985)
• Scales of Independent Behavior “Revised (SIB-R; Bruininks, Woodcock, Weatherman, & Hill, 1996). This scale will serve two purposes. One, the overall score, assessed at baseline, will be used as a quantitative indicator of adaptive functioning typically used to evaluate severity of disability, control variable used for descriptive and exploratory statistical analyses. Additionally, the Problems Behaviors component of the SIB-R can be administered as an outcome variable.
• Burns Depression Inventory (The Feeling Good Handbook, David Burns, M.D., Penguin Group, 1999).
• Beck’s Depression Scale
• Beck’s Anxiety Scale
• Depression subscale of the Anxiety, Depression and Mood Scale (ADAMS; Esbensen, Aman, & Ruedrich, 2003). This is an informant-report of basic depression behaviors.
• Depression subscale of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI; Derogatis, 1993)
• Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS)
• Emotional Self-Efficacy (ESE) subscale that is part of the Childhood Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (SEQ; Muris, 2001).
• Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Fourth Edition (PPVT-IV; Dunn & Dunn, 1997) The PPVT is a measure of receptive verbal ability. This ability has often been found to moderate CBT treatment outcomes. It will be included not as an outcome variable, but as a moderator.