Date Presented 04/19/21
The Social Cognition Screening Questionnaire–Taiwan version (SCSQT) was designed to assess multiple domains of social cognition in people with schizophrenia in Taiwan. The SCSQT contains five subscales and provides estimates of the core domains of mentalizing and social perception and an overall social cognition score. Our validation of SCSQT indicated that the SCSQT had good test–retest reliability, acceptable random measurement error, and negligible practice effects.
Primary Author and Speaker: Shu-Chun Lee
Additional Authors and Speakers: Trudy Mallinson
Contributing Authors: Alison M. Cogan, Ann Guernon, Katherine O'Brien, and Piper Hansen
PURPOSE: Social cognition refers to how people think about themselves and others in society. However, impairments in social cognition have been observed in people with schizophrenia. The Social Cognition Screening Questionnaire Taiwan version (SCSQT) assesses social cognition with its five domains: theory of mind, schematic inference, verbal memory, metacognition, and hostility bias. A higher SCSTQ score indicates better social cognition. However, the psychometric properties of the SCSQT are unknown in people with schizophrenia. The test-retest reliability of the SCSQT is helpful in determining whether repeated measures are reproducible. Thus, the aim of this study was to examine the test-retest reliability, random measurement error, and practice effects between two successive assessments of the SCSQT in people with schizophrenia.
DESIGN: People with schizophrenia were recruited by convenience sampling from two community-based psychiatric rehabilitation day centers affiliated with a medical center in northern Taiwan. People were included in this study if they met the following criteria: (1) diagnosis of schizophrenia according to the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 5th edition, (2) age above 20 years, and (3) Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) score of more than 24 points. The exclusion criteria of this study were: (1) diagnosis of other neurological or psychiatric disorders affecting cognition, (2) another severe medical condition or psychiatric disorder that required treatment during the study, or (3) unstable severity of illness [specifically, if the Clinical Global Impressions Scale-Severity (CGIS) scores were different between the first and last assessments of the study].
METHOD: To examine the test-retest reliability of the SCSQT, each participant was assessed twice with a 2-week interval between assessments. In each assessment, the participants completed the SCSQT and CGIS. The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to examine the test-retest reliability of the SCSQT, the percentage of minimal detectable change (MDC%) to examine the random measurement error, the standardized response mean to examine the practice effect, and Bland-Altman plots to visually examine the limits of agreement.
RESULTS: Ninety-one participants were recruited in this study, and sixty-three people with consistent CGIS were included in the data analysis, of whom twenty-six were male. The mean age of participants was 46.1 years (SD = 11.2). We found that the scores of four dimensions of SCSQT (theory of mind, schematic inference, verbal memory, and hostility bias) and the total score of SCSQT had good test-retest reliability (ICCs = 0.68-0.85), except the score of metacognition (ICC = 0.47). The MDC95 (MDC95%) of the total score of the SCSQT was 4.7 (23.0%). Trivial practice effects occurred across two successive assessments.
CONCLUSION: The SCSQT has good reliability and trivial practice effects for clinicians to measure social cognition repeatedly in people with schizophrenia. The total score of the SCSQT had an acceptable random measurement error. The MDC value of the SCSQT total score is helpful for clinicians to determine whether the change in SCSQT is real.
References
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