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More on Self-Help and the Mentally Ill...

Questions, however, have been raised about self-help's effectiveness and the types of outcomes that self-help agencies can deliver. As part of the effort to enhance treatment outcomes, clients' satisfaction with services has become one of the criteria most frequently used to evaluate program success. To measure client satisfaction, a new instrument, the Self-Help Agency Satisfaction Scale (SHASS) was developed and administered to 248 long-term users of four client-operated agencies.

The SHASS, brief (11 items) and easy to administer, measures two key dimensions of satisfaction: satisfaction with the client's involvement in the self-help agency, and satisfaction with the concrete services received. These two factors are the most salient in evaluating the provision of mental health services.

Central to the operation of self-help agencies is the active involvement of clients in the helping process. The study focused on the development of a multidimensional measure of satisfaction that included subscales reflecting both satisfaction with active involvement in the agency and satisfaction with the support or services received. The SHASS exhibited high internal consistencies, moderate stability, and discriminant validity with measures of satisfaction with quality of life. In addition, the SHASS subscales showed modest associations with two of four measures of client outcomes - assisted and independent social functioning.

Excerpted from Steven P. Segal, Dina Redman, and Carol Silverman (September 2000), "Measuring Clients' Satisfaction with Self-Help Agencies," Psychiatric Services 51(9).