A pilot validation study of a new measure of activity in psychosis.

Background: Wing and Brown [Wing JK and Brown GW (1970) Institutionalism and schizophrenia: a comparative study of three mental health hospitals 1960-1968. Cambridge University Press, London] demonstrated a clear relationship between activity and clinical improvement, using time budget methodology with people with psychosis. However, existing time budget measures are demanding to complete, and simpler, check-box measures of activity rely on subjective frequency judgements and do not include the full range of activities in which an individual might be involved. We report on a pilot validation of a simplified time budget measure of activity levels for routine use as a measure of change with people with psychosis.

Methods: Forty-two participants living in the local community with a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis were grouped according to length of illness and, within the longer duration group, into high/low activity. All completed the time budget. On a second occasion, 15 participants also completed the subscales of the Social Functioning Scale (SFS) (Br J Psychiatry 157:853-859, 1990) to assess construct validity, and 15 completed the time budget to assess test-retest reliability.

Results: The time budget discriminated between duration and activity level groups and showed good inter-rater reliability and test-retest reliability. On the SFS, correlations with subscales measuring withdrawal, activities of daily living and employment were found.

Conclusions: Results indicate that our measure is tapping the activity component of social functioning. A larger scale validation study and investigation of sensitivity to change is underway.