THE RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY OF THE OUTCOME QUESTIONNAIRE

With the rise in efforts to evaluate the quality of mental health care and its outcomes, the measurement of change has become an important t opic. This paper tracks the creation of a new instrument designed to a ssess psychotherapy outcome. The Outcome Questionnaire (OQ) was design ed to include items relevant to three domains central to mental health : subjective discomfort, interpersonal relations, and social role perf ormance. This study describes the theoretical development and psychome tric properties of the OQ. Psychometric properties were assessed using clinical, community, and undergraduate samples. The OQ appears to hav e high reliability and evidence to suggest good concurrent and constru ct validity of the total score. The data presented show that it distin guishes patient from non-patient samples, is sensitive to change, and correlates with other measures of patient distress.