Abstract
BackgroundThe Psychiatric Out-Patient Experiences Questionnaire (POPEQ) is an 11-item core measure of psychiatric out-patients experiences of the perceived outcome of the treatment, the quality of interaction with the clinician, and the quality of information provision. The POPEQ was found to have evidence for reliability and validity following the application of classical test theory but has not previously been assessed by Rasch analysis.MethodsTwo national postal surveys of psychiatric outpatients took place in Norway in 2004 and 2007. The performance of the POPEQ, including item functioning and differential item functioning, was assessed by Rasch analysis. Principal component analysis of item residuals was used to assess the presence of subdimensions.Results6,677 (43.3%) and 11,085 (35.2%) psychiatric out patients responded to the questionnaire in 2004 and 2007, respectively. All items in the scale were retained after the Rasch analysis. The resulting scale had reasonably good fit to the Rasch model. The items performed the same for the two survey years and there was no differential item functioning relating to patient characteristics. Principal component analysis of the residuals confirmed that the measure to a high degree is unidimensional. However, the data also reflects three potential subscales, each relating to one of the three included aspects of health care.ConclusionsThe POPEQ had excellent psychometric properties and Rasch analysis further supported the construct validity of the scale by also identifying the three subdimensions originally included as components in the instrument development. The 11-item instrument is recommended in future research on psychiatric out-patient experiences. Future development may lead to the construction of more precise measures of the three subdomains that the POPEQ is based on.
Highlights
The Psychiatric Out-Patient Experiences Questionnaire (POPEQ) is an 11-item core measure of psychiatric out-patients experiences of the perceived outcome of the treatment, the quality of interaction with the clinician, and the quality of information provision
To assess nonresponse bias 293 postal non-respondents from 10 clinics were randomly selected to be included in a telephone follow-up. 110 patients answered by telephone and the difference between telephone respondents and postal respondents on the POPEQ-11 scale was small and insignificant (2 on a scale from 0 to 100), indicating little non-response bias [20]
There were no significant differences in the amount of missing data between the two surveys
Summary
The Psychiatric Out-Patient Experiences Questionnaire (POPEQ) is an 11-item core measure of psychiatric out-patients experiences of the perceived outcome of the treatment, the quality of interaction with the clinician, and the quality of information provision. The measurement of patient experiences or satisfaction is based on self-report where individual patients respond to a scale to reflect their perceptions of health care quality. The general principles for the measurement of psychological constructs often referred to as psychometrics or test theory, provide the underlying methods for constructing a scale reflecting such latent traits. The vast majority of healthrelated research that has used IRT relate to the development and evaluation of measures for health status and quality of life, and only a handful of articles have reported the use of IRT approaches in the analysis of scales developed to measure patient experiences or satisfaction [12,13,14,15,16,17]
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