Previously submitted to: JMIR Mental Health (no longer under consideration since Jun 09, 2022)
Date Submitted: Jun 8, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Examining concurrent validity and item selection of the Wants and Needs Outcome Measure (SWAN-OM) in a web-based therapy service
ABSTRACT
Background:
Single-session mental health interventions are frequently attended by children and young people in both web-based and face-to-face therapy settings. The Session “Wants” and “Needs” Outcome Measure (SWAN-OM) is an instrument developed in a web-based therapy service to overcome challenges of collecting outcomes and experiences of single-session therapies. It provides pre-defined goals of the session, selected by the young person prior to the intervention, on which progress towards achievement is scored at the end of the session.
Objective:
To evaluate the instrument’s psychometric properties, including concurrent validity against other frequently used outcome and experience measures, at a web-based service.
Methods:
The SWAN-OM was administered for a period of six months to 1401 children and young people (aged 10 to 32; 79.3% White; 77.59% female) accessing single-session therapy in a web-based service. Item correlations with comparator measures and hierarchical logistic regressions to predict item selection were calculated for concurrent validity and psychometric exploration.
Results:
Most frequently selected items are “Feel better” (N= 431; 11.61%) and “Find ways I can help myself” (N= 411; 11.07%); unpopular items are “Feel safe in my relationships” (N= 53; 1.43%) and “Learn the steps to achieve something I want” (N= 58; 1.56%). The SWAN-OM is significantly correlated with the Experience of Service Questionnaire (ESQ), particularly the item: “Feel better”(rs(109) = .48, p < .001), the Youth Counselling Impact Scale (YCIS), particularly the item: “Learn the steps to achieve something I want” (rs(22) = .76, p < .001), and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), particularly the items: item “Learn how to feel better” (rs(22) = .72, p < .001) and were “Explore how I feel” (rs(70) = -.44, p < .001).
Conclusions:
The SWAN-OM demonstrates good concurrent validity with common measures of outcome and experience. Analysis suggests that lesser endorsed items may be removed in future iterations of the measure, to improve functionality. Future research is required to explore SWAN-OM’s potential to measure meaningful change, in a range of therapeutic settings.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.