A WEIGHTED TIME BUDGET APPROACH FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF COGNITIVE AND SOCIAL ACTIVITIES

An instrument designed to assess potentially challenging cognitive and social activities in a wide range of both psychiatric and normal stud y populations is described in this paper. The technique used combines traditional time budget approaches with an additional, significant com ponent, i. e. a rating indicating the amount of challenge for each act ivity that is sampled. Separate ratings reflecting the subject's and t he interviewer's perspective are generated. Along with a detailed desc ription of this weighted time budget instrument, preliminary data rega rding practicality, reliability and validity are reported. An analysis based on time budget interviews with 30 schizophrenic patients showed overall interrater agreement to average 84 % (kappa = 0.72). In a stu dy with a possible bearing on the concurrent validity of the instrumen t, relapsing schizophrenics significantly differed from stable subject s in weighted time budget indices.