Exploration of experiences in therapeutic groups for patients with severe mental illness: development of the Ferrara group experiences scale (FE- GES)

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Rosangela Caruso¹  Luigi Grassi²  Luciano Bonatti³  Bruno Biancosino⁴  Luciana Marmai⁴  Maria Moscara⁵  Marco Rigatelli⁵  Stefan Priebe⁶  Catherine Carr⁶ 

[1] Department of Behavior and Communication, Section of Psychiatry, University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy;Department of Behavior and Communication, Section of Psychiatry, University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy;Department of Mental Health and Drug Abuse, Ferrara Health Agency, Ferrara, Italy;Department of Mental Health and Drug Abuse, Bologna Health Agency, Bologna, Italy;Department of Mental Health and Drug Abuse, Ferrara Health Agency, Ferrara, Italy;Department of Neuroscience, Section of Psychiatry, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy;Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK;

关键词: Group therapy;    Patient experiences;    Severe mental illness;    Community mental health care;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-13-242

 received in 2013-03-26, accepted in 2013-09-25,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundGroup therapies are routinely provided for patients with severe mental illness. The factors important to the group experience of patients are still poorly understood and are rarely measured. To support further research and practice, we aimed to develop a questionnaire that captures how patients experience groups within a community mental health context.MethodsAn initial pool of 39 items was conceptually generated to assess different aspects of group experiences. Items were completed by 166 patients with severe mental illness attending group therapies in community mental health services in Italy. Patients with different psychiatric diagnoses who attended at least 5 group sessions were included. An exploratory factor analysis was used to identify different dimensions of group experiences and to reduce the number of items for each dimension.ResultsThe resulting questionnaire has five subscales: 1) sharing of emotions and experiences, 2) cognitive improvement, 3) group learning, 4) difficulties in open expression and 5) relationships. Each subscale has 4 items. The scale and sub-scales have good internal consistency.ConclusionsThe Ferrara Group Experiences Scale is conceptually derived and assesses dimensions of group experience that are theoretically and practically relevant. It is brief, easy to use and has good psychometric properties. After further validation, the scale may be used for research into patient experiences across different group therapy modalities and for evaluation in routine care.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Caruso et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.