Objective: This study compared three instruments that are used to measure empowerment of people with psychotic disorders. The study evaluated internal consistency, discriminant and convergent validity, sensitivity to symptom levels, and clinical usefulness. Methods: Fifty patients in the Netherlands were administered the Empowerment Scale (ES), the Personal Empowerment Scale (PES), and the Mental Health Confidence Scale (MHCS). E mpowerment is an outcome pursued by advocacy groups, consumer organizations, mental health professionals, and health care providers. It originates from the political arena, although a consensus has not yet been reached on its definition.
ResultsThe many definitions of empowerment suggest that the concept is still evolving (1), and the number of empirical studies on empowerment is limited. Most definitions of empowerment include participation in society in terms of access to employment, education, and other valued resources (2,3). However, there is a distinction between definitions focusing on interpersonal characteristicscontrol over one's life and the recovery process or the efforts to achieve more control and self-efficacy (1)-and those that also highlight influencing the organizational and societal structure in which one lives (4).In instruments developed to measure empowerment, these differences can be seen. In this study, we assessed the impact of these differences and examined whether these instruments measure the same concept. Also, we aimed to gain some insight into how to choose the right instrument for measuring empowerment in a population of patients with psychotic disorders.The instruments studied are the Empowerment Scale (ES) (1), the Personal Empowerment Scale (PES) (2), and the Mental Health Confidence Scale (MHCS) (5). They are the most frequently cited instruments to measure empowerment in the literature, and their reliability and validity have already been established for people with severe mental illness (1,2,6). Here we reappraised their internal consistency, convergent and discriminant validity, and applicability for patients with psychotic disorders (7,8). As for their convergent and discriminant validity, we hypothesized that the total scores of the instruments will have correlations of at least .70 and that between subscales with common content the correlations will be even stronger. Furthermore, we assessed the association between empowerment and the level of symptoms.
Methods