Assessing self-determining attitudes and behaviors in court mandated treatment clients

Abstract

Scope and Method of Study: The study was to test a newly constructed self-determination scale designed for court mandated treatment clients. To achieve this item analysis and an exploratory factor analysis were conducted to examine the structure of the new instrument, the Self-Determining Attitudes in Court Mandated Clients (SDA/CMC). Psychometric evaluation included reliability analysis, and evaluation of evidence for content validity, convergent validity and criterion based validity. In addition comparisons of group means on the instrument subscales were conducted.

Findings and Conclusions: The item analysis and exploratory factor analysis did not reveal the theoretical self-determination constructs of competence, autonomy and relatedness. The three factor solution was interpreted to describe a self-determination factor, a motivational factor and an obstacle to recovery factor. The reliability for these subscales was acceptable as all three were above .80. There was evidence for convergent validity as the SDA/CMC was highly correlated with subscales on an existing self-determination instrument the Basic Psychological Needs Survey (BPNS). Evidence for criterion related validity was observed using a process where counselors rated clients into low or high self-determining groups. The subscales of the SDA/CMC also detected differences when examining the group means of the phases group and employment status group. The findings support the need for further instrument development, expanding sample size and population invariance testing.