MEASURING TREATMENT PHILOSOPHY - A SCALE FOR SUBSTANCE-ABUSE RECOVERYPROGRAMS

The assessment of the philosophy that guides substance abuse treatment programs has been a difficult subject to approach by those working in treatment research. Differing treatment philosophies are generally, r epresented by multi-dimensional theoretical constructs that do not eas ily lend themselves to assessment by quantitative means. in the U.S., substance abuse treatment programs have been suggested as fitting into a disease (or medical) model, a social learning (or psychological) mo del, or a social community model in designing a treatment regime for c lients. This paper presents a Social Model Philosophy Scale (SMPS) to classify the Extent to which a given treatment program follows a socia l model approach to treatment. The final version of the SMPS (availabl e from the first author) contains 33 questions for use in residential programs, divided into six conceptual domains: physical environment, s taff role, authority base, view of substance abuse problems,ls, govern ance, and community; orientation. Overall internal reliability is high (alpha = .92), with subscale alphas ranging between .57 and .79. Test -retest analyses showed that the information obtained from the SMPS is consistent across time, administrators, and respondents. In addition, the SMPS is brief and easy to administer. Methodology used in item cr eation and final item selection is reported. Although not designed to distinguish philosophies other-than social model, early results sugges t that rite SMPS may also be used to classify other program philosophi es. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc.