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Article Excerpt
Clients (N = 151) completed the Schwartz Outcome Scale (SOS-10; M. A. Blais et al., 1999) and the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory-3 (F. G. Miller & L. E. Lazowski, 1999). The results show a negative relationship between substance use symptoms and SOS-10 scores and a positive relationship between defensiveness and SOS-10 scores.
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It is vital that counselors conduct outcome research both to demonstrate the effectiveness of treatments and programs (Sexton, 1996) and to further the effort to gain support from third-party payers (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, 1997). However, constraints that are posed by lengthy or invasive instruments or the targeting of particular change variables have restricted widespread use of particular outcome measures (e.g., the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised [Derogatis, 1983]; the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale [Overall & Gotham, 1962]). In an effort to meet counselors' needs for a brief, cost-effective, unobtrusive, and easy-to-administer assessment device that can be used as an outcome measure, Blais et al. (1999) introduced the Schwartz Outcome Scale (SOS-10).
The SOS-10 was developed using a multifaceted process. A literature review and an expert panel that included psychologists, psychiatrists, a neurosurgeon, and two focus groups made up of patients produced an initial pool of 81 Likert-style items that were believed to identify changes in people's lives that might be seen as a result of successful mental health treatment. Item elimination was conducted through a process of reviewing the responses of individuals who had been patients in an outpatient psychiatry clinic, a psychopharmacy clinic, an emergency room acute psychiatry clinic, a 21-bed inpatient medical psychiatry unit, or a community mental health clinic and responses from hospital employees. Retained items consistently discriminated between the patients in the various facilities and the hospital employees (i.e., consistently loaded on one factor after Varimax rotation) and were not vulnerable to ceiling effects. The final 10-item scale has strong internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = .96) and item-to-scale correlations of .74 to .90. A 1-week test-retest reliability coefficient of .87 was found in a nonpatient population. Principal components factor analysis revealed one factor that accounted for 76% of the total variance. Strong convergent validity and divergent validity for the SOS-10 were established with measures of hopelessness, self-esteem, positive and negative affect, mental health, fatigue, life satisfaction, psychiatric symptoms, and desire to live (Blais et al., 1999).
Since its introduction in 1999, several SOS-10 validation studies have been conducted, the results of which have extended the instrument's usefulness to populations beyond the original normative sample. Laux, Young, Waehler, and Phillips (2000) used the Outcome Questionnaire-45 (Lambert, Lunnen, Umphress, Hansen, & Burlingame, 1994; Wells, Burlingame, Lambert, Hoag, & Hope, 1996), an established measure of progress and outcomes in outpatient psychotherapy, to examine the validity of the SOS-10 in a population of college counseling center clients. Laux et al. found that the SOS-10 was a robust measure of overall general well-being and distress in a population of college students who sought services at a university counseling center.
Young, Laux, Waehler, McDaniel, and Hilsenroth (2001) conducted an investigation of the SOS-10's psychometric properties in several additional populations. The SOS-10 and the Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank--College Version (RISB; Rotter & Rafferty, 1950) were administered to a group of undergraduates at a large midwestern university. The comparison of the SOS-10, a self-report measure, with the RISB, a projective measure, resulted in a significant correlation, indicating that the two instruments were similarly measuring general well-being. Young et al. concluded that the...
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