S222. A SYSTEMATIC AND METHODOLOGICAL REVIEW OF RECENT SOCIAL FUNCTIONING MEASURES AND APPROACHES

Abstract

BackgroundMany people with a psychosis diagnosis have significant impairments in their social functioning. Despite this, long standing lack of consensus exists in the definition of social functioning in psychosis. Efforts to evaluate interventions for social functioning are hampered by measurement difficulties, and comparing interventions is difficult. Popular measures of social functioning vary widely, both conceptually and methodologically, and it is unclear how meaningful they are for service users. With the increasing development and evaluation of social interventions for psychosis and the boom in the development of measures, this paper reviews the recently developed measures of social functioning. It aggregates how often and in which studies measures have been used, the concepts and theories that underlie them, as well as assessing their quality across a number of indicators, with a particular focus on how patient-centred they are.MethodsSystematic review and narrative synthesis.Results21 new measures of social functioning were identified, of low to moderate quality. The content, definitions, theories and domains will be discussed, as well as a discussion of changes in the construct over time. Discussion will include the development of measures for use in first episode psychosis, measures with a focus on negative symptoms and the increasing use of technology in the assessment of social functioning.DiscussionMany measures exist for assessing social functioning in psychosis, of variable quality. Further attention should be directed to psychometric evaluation and ensuring service user involvement in development.