TREATMENT ACCEPTABILITY AND “FAKING GOOD”: ARE STAFF TELLING US WHAT THEY THINK WE WANT TO HEAR?

Treatment acceptability refers to how acceptable various treatment alternatives are to individuals who are subjected to and who implement those treatments. While treatment-acceptability research increases in popularity, some have questioned its usefulness. In particular, Schwartz and Baer (1991) question whether staff might be telling us what we want to hear, analogous to the phenomenon of test-takers “faking good” while taking personality tests. In this study, we sought to investigate the possibility of such bias in treatment-acceptability ratings. Direct-care staff at a large residential facility were presented with a clinical vignette and five treatment options to rate. They also received three different types of instructions (standard, “fake good,” and “prompted honesty”) designed to determine whether biases in ratings would appear. Results indicate that, under these conditions, staff do not fake good, i.e., there were no differences across instructional conditions. Collapsing across conditions, staff did differ in their ratings on the five treatment alternatives. Reasons for current results and suggestions for further research are discussed.     

Violent behavior patterns on psychiatric wards

A study of 379 violent incidents between pairs of psychiatric inpatients during an eight-month period indicates a substantial number of patterned associations between assaulting patients and those struck. In addition, regularities are observed in these incidents between frequency of occurrence and spatiotemporal and other contextual factors. Taken in the aggregate, these relationships support enlargement of most current conceptualizations of the violent act in psychiatric settings, which focus almost exclusively upon physiologic and psychologic state changes within the identified initiator of violent acts.     

Can the Family Assessment Device (FAD) Be Used with School Aged Children?

This article examines the usefulness of the Family Assessment Device(FAD) in assessing family functioning with school-aged children (under 12 years of age) compared to children 12 and older and mothers. FAD reports from 194 children with asthma (132 under 12 years; 62 12 years and older) were evaluated in comparison to mothers' FAD reports as well as mothers' reports on two other family functioning measures: the Family Inventory of Life Events (FILE) and the Impact on Family (IOF) scale, both relevant to functioning in families with children with asthma. Although FAD scale reliabilities were lowest in younger children (alpha = 48-.79), good concurrent validity was found with mothers' reports on the three different measures of family functioning. Older childrens' FAD scales showed good reliability (> .70) but poorer agreement with the various maternal measures. With modifications to make items more structured and simplified, the FAD could be tried with younger children, although documentation of improved reliability is needed before more widespread use with school-aged children is advocated. The measure already shows good agreement with maternal report in this younger age group, which likely would be strengthened with improved reliability. FAD reports in older children correlated less well with maternal measures, but may represent nonredundant information on family health from an independent perspective and are worth considering in addition to mothers' perspectives.     

Racial bias in decisions made by mock jurors evaluating a case of sexual harassment

White (N = 161) and Black (N = 152) college students served as mock jurors in a simulated civil case in which a female plaintiff accused a male defendant of sexual harassment. The authors experimentally manipulated the race (Black or White) of the litigants and asked the mock jurors to decide whether the defendant was guilty; to rate the certainty of their belief in the defendant's guilt; and, when they judged the defendant guilty, to recommend an award to the plaintiff. Mock jurors of both races tended to favor litigants of their own race and their own gender. Racial bias was highest among White male jurors and lowest among White female jurors.     

Separating sensitivity from response bias: implications of comparisons of yes-no and forced-choice tests for models and measures of recognition memory

A fundamental challenge to psychological research is the measurement of cognitive processes uncontaminated by response strategies resulting from different testing procedures. Test-free estimates of ability are vital when comparing the performance of different groups or different conditions. The current study applied several sets of measurement models to both forced-choice and yes-no recognition memory tests and concluded that the traditional signal-detection model resulted in distorted estimates of accuracy. Two-factor models were necessary to separate memory sensitivity from response bias. These models indicated that (a) memory accuracy did not differ across the tests and (b) the tests relied on the same underlying memory processes. The results illustrate the pitfalls of using a single-component model to measure accuracy in tasks that reflect 2 or more underlying processes.