Score Redevelopment Utilizing Factor Analysis and Expert Knowledge: Creating a Briefer BERS

• Activity Number: 165
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 9, 2004 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Laura S. Morris*+ and Karen Hennigan and Lisa Russell and Debbie Rinehart and Nina Kammerer
• Companies: Policy Research Associates and Social Science Research Institute, Inc. and ETR Associates and Arapahoe House, Inc. and Health and Addictions Research, Inc.
• Keywords: scale development ; strength-based assessment ; multivariate analysis

Abstract

The Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale (BERS) is one of the leading strength-based instruments used to assess children's functioning. As part of the Women, Co-occurring Disorders and Violence Children's Subset Study, the BERS was administered to 253 women with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders and histories of trauma, to describe their children. We were unable to test the subscale structure using confirmatory factor analysis due to a singular matrix. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA), however, did not support the published subscale structure. Additionally, feedback from interviewers and clinicians raised concerns about the relevance and conciseness of the BERS's 52 individual items and five subscales. To address these analytic and content-oriented concerns, feedback from consumers, clinicians, and researchers was integrated with EFA and reliability analyses to redevelop the scale. Through this process a new scale was constructed containing 17 items and four subscales, resulting in an increased percentage of explained variation. Preliminary validation suggests that this briefer BERS is comparable to the original BERS for assessing this population.