SCALE OF SELF-ASSESSMENT OF MENTALIZATION AND SELF-AGENCY DEVELOPMENT IN MENTALIZATION-BASED THERAPY PROCESS (SAMS): FIRST VALIDATION

Abstract

Developing reliable and valid tools for measuring the effectiveness of psychological and psychotherapeutic interventions is a critical task of modern psychological science and practice in Ukraine. The article presents a description of approbation of the psychological questionnaire (scale) for measuring self-assessment of development mentalization and self-agency in the process of mentalization-based psychological counseling (therapy) (SAMS). SAMS was developed within the theoretical psychoanalytic paradigm based on the psychodynamic tradition of empirical studies of the effectiveness of psychological interventions. The theory of mentalization by P. Fonagy and the theory of self-agency by J. Knox became the theoretical foundation of the SAMS. The purpose of the empirical study is to develop the body of SAMS and to check it for reliability and validity. Psychometric strengths of the SAMS were checked on a sample of clients of the project “Poradnya” (psychological counseling center) of psychology and psychotherapy Department of the Ukrainian Catholic University. 86 people were studied in the initial research and 32 in the re-test research. The study examined the SAMS methodology for internal, constitutional, and re-test reliability and its structural and constitutional convergent validity. According to the results of the conducted empirical research, it can be stated that the SAMS technique has high reliability and validity. Therefore, it can be used in further scientific studies of the effectiveness of psychological interventions in the same way as in psychological practice in Ukraine.