A new questionnaire assessing the opinions of the relatives of patients with schizophrenia on the causes and social consequences of the disorder: reliability and validity

This paper describes the development and the validation of a questionnaire assessing the opinions of the relatives of patients with schizophrenia on t he causes and the social consequences of the disorder. The final Version of the questionnaire includes 28 items, grouped in four sub-scales (social re strictions, social distance, utility of treatments, biopsychosocial causes of schizophrenia), whose intra-rater reliability ranges from 0.36 to 0.84. Cronbach's alpha coefficient, which tests the content validity of the sub-s cales, ranges from 0.56 to 0.66. Factor analysis identifies two factors (op inions an social consequences and the utility of treatments, and the belief s on the causes of schizophrenia), which account for the 73% of the total v ariance. This questionnaire may be particularly useful to assess relatives' beliefs about schizophrenia and to target psychosocial interventions in th e families of patients with schizophrenia. (C) 1999 Elsevier, Paris.