Abstract
Service users’ involvement in mental health service research is increasingly acknowledged as important, yet, whilst involving users of mental health services as research participants is commonplace, seeking out their experience and indeed their “expertise” to facilitate the development of tools to be used within mental health services is in its infancy. This article describes the involvement and views of service users in the development of a nursing metric—the Therapeutic Engagement Questionnaire. It presents their role in the three stages of development: generation, statement reduction and authentication.
Highlights
Adopting a model for the development of a measure is important as the results of studies surrounding therapeutic engagement are dependent on the quality of the tools used for data collection.[3]
The research team have structured the Therapeutic Engagement Questionnaire (TEQ) to be multidimensional with themes of Compassion, Communication, Courage, Commitment and Collaboration as the facets underlying this 20-statement tool
There is a growing literature on the variables that are associated with therapeutic engagement.[30,31]
Summary
All service users involved in this project were aged 18 years or over and had resided for more than 1 week within an adult acute inpatient mental health care setting (voluntary or detained), had mental capacity to consent to participate and had good command of the English language. The service users were asked to participate in a focus group to share feedback regarding clarity of instructions, statements, scoring method and response options, use of language/wording, ease of completion, presentation/layout and anything they felt could be improved and/or changed. A focus group was chosen as the forum in which to “share” feedback and provide opportunity for peer support, exchange of ideas and common values.[26,27] The focus group adopted an informal, unstructured discussion, using the “think-aloud” approach,[28] in order for the service user respondents to feel comfortable in describing their thoughts about the questionnaire This method avoided interpretation by the service user respondents and only assumed a very simple verbalization process which allows for discussion to be considered as objective data.[28] Guidance questions were formulated and used as prompts in the focus group which lasted approximately 25 minutes. Information about the groups/factors of the TEQ and its psychometric properties will be discussed in another article pertaining to this project in the near future
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