J. Muller et Hj. Luderer, DEWIPA - Developing a standardised questionnaire to determine depressed patients' knowledge of their disease, PSYCHIAT PR, 26(4), 1999, pp. 167-170
Objective: The aim of this study was ro develop a questionnaire for measuri
ng depressed patients' knowledge of their diesease. Methods: 55 patients su
ffering from depressive episodes answered a 77-items questionnaire. Results
: Item analysis showed a discriminative power higher than 30 for 40 items,
all of which applied to one factor. The items were arranged into two themat
ically similar 20 items forms. We added four additional items (discriminati
ve power between 0.20 and 0.29) because future research may lead to differe
nt results concerning discriminative power. The questionnaires DEWIPA-A and
DEWIPA-B consists of 24 items each. The average difficulty is equal for bo
th DEWIPA forms and they both possess significant discriminative power. Con
clusions: Our results support the hypothesis that DEWIPA is a valid and rel
iable instrument to determine patients' knowledge of symptoms, causes and t
he psychopharmacological treatment of depression.