Authors: Cheryl Reed, Tim Coombs, Rosemary Dickson
Year: 2019
Event: 2019 TheMHS Conference
Subject: Development of a Short Measure of Social Inclusion – The Living in the Community Summary (LCQ-S)
Type of resource: Conference Presentations and Papers
Abstract:
Biography:
Cheryl Reed is a program evaluator and social researcher who has been working in co-design and the measurement of social inclusion for over two decades. She has been involved in the LCQ and LCQ-S projects since their early development, leading the qualitative research, psychometric analysis and reporting.
The Fifth National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan (Fifth Plan) has identified improving social inclusion for mental health consumers as a key priority. The Fifth Plan includes specific performance indicators on employment, housing, connectedness, meaning in life and social and community participation. Measures are available for these topics from national population surveys. However, there is no current source of this data for consumers of specialist mental health services, for whom barriers to social inclusion may be greatest. No data source exists for indicators of Connectedness and meaning in life and Proportion of mental health consumers in suitable housing.
The Living in the Community Questionnaire (LCQ) (Coombs, Reed, & Rosen, 2016) has been identified as a potential measure that may be suitable for reporting of Fifth Plan indicators (Australian Health Ministers, 2017). Expert feedback has suggested that the utility of the LCQ would be improved through the creation of a summary form with a smaller number of questions and simplified scaling.
The paper will report on the development of the LCQ-S and its testing with an online panel. The paper will also discuss the future development and availability of the LCQ-S.
Learning Objectives
Learning Objective 1: The audience will learn of the development of the LCQ-S, including its suitability, validity and reliability.
Learning Objective 2: The LCQ-S provides a summary form that can be used to measure consumer social inclusion. It has both clinical and policy utility.
References
Australian Health Ministers. (2017). Fifth National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan. Canberra: Australian Government.
Coombs, T., Reed, C., & Rosen, A. (2016). Developing the living in the community questionnaire: reporting the social outcomes of mental health care. Asia Pacific Journal of Social Work & Development, 26, 178 - 183.
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