A Systematic Review and Quality Assessment of Therapeutic Group Process Questionnaires

ABSTRACT

The aims of this study were to systematically review the literature on questionnaire-based group process measures and assess the psychometric scale development properties of these measures. A systematic search of questionnaire-based measures of group process was conducted from four databases: PsycINFO, Medline, EMBASE and AMED. A quality assessment was undertaken using established criteria. Only studies that described the development of questionnaire-based scales were included. Seventeen studies which described thirteen measures were included in the analysis. The developed list highlights a range of questionnaires that can be used by clinicians and researchers seeking to measure either “specific therapeutic group mechanisms” or “overall group experiences.” Further research should focus on developing the content validity of these scales by involving the target population during item selection and reduction.     

Languages and designs for probability judgment

Theories of subjective probability are viewed as formal languages for analyzing evidence and expressing degrees of belief. This article focuses on two probability langauges, the Bayesian language and the language of belief functions (Shafer, 1976). We describe and compare the semantics (i.e., the meaning of the scale) and the syntax (i.e., the formal calculus) of these languages. We also investigate some of the designs for probability judgment afforded by the two languages.     

Forget assimilation: introducing subjectivity to German–Jewish history

Between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust, a wide range of German-speaking Jewish subjects shared certain assumptions about a problematic associated with being Jewish and living in a non-Jewish German society (and the concomitant process of relative “assimilation”). The categories of identity and culture that undergirded this problematic became part of a shared lexicon of a German-Jewish “identity crisis”—a lexicon that was handed down to the historiography of German Jews that would develop after the community’s destruction. The author of this contribution challenges the validity of some of these categorical assumptions by setting them against the varied background of German-Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offering a model of subjectivity (rather than identity) that might allow the historiography to break out of the cyclical repetition in which it currently finds itself. By examining specific exemplars, including Gershom Scholem, Edith Stein, Martin Buber, and others, the author models a reading strategy that would be appropriate for German-Jewish subjectivity.