Psychiatrists' prognostic judgments regarding functional psychotic disorders: A prognostic scale

Abstract

In the field of psychiatric treatment, the patient is more often the subject of behavioral research than the psychiatrist. However, the behavior patterns of the psychiatric practitioner may well have significant bearing upon his treatment of patients. Before the consequences of a psychiatrist's behavior patterns can be explored, it is necessary to establish whether or not psychiatric practitioners share common frames of reference.

Judged prognosis for functional psychosis disorder classifications: A prothetic continuum.

“…." When the magnitude scale was graphed against the Case V pair comparison scale presented by Stone (1966) a marked "concave downward" relationship was observed. The pair comparison scale was very close to being a logarithmic function of the scale based on direct magnitude estimations.…”

“…The product-moment correlation between the magnitude and the category scales is .933 (df=l3, p<.00l). The correlation coefficient (Spearman's rho) between the magnitude scale and the pair comparison scale (Stone, 1966) is .95, and between the category scale and the pair comparison scale, ,94 (df -13). The rank-order relationships (Spearman rhos, df = 13) for the psychiatrists' magnitude, category, and pair comparison scales with the clinical psychologists' ordinal scale (Stone & James, 1965) are .89, .93, and .92, respectively.…”

“…The judgmental stimuli (listed in Table 1) were the same IS functional psychosis disorder classifications used in previous investigations (Stone, 1966;Stone & James, 1965) and had been selected from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental Disorders.…”

“…Clinical judgments of psychiatrists (Stone, 1966) and psychologists (Stone & James, 1965) have been used to construct scales of judged prognosis for functional psychosis nomenclature classifications and were found to be sufficiently reliable, possessing interval scale and ordinal scale measurement properties, respectively. The psychiatrist judgment scale (based on the Case V of Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgment) has been found to be markedly related to personality test dimensions (of patients) as measured by the MMPI and other psychometric indices (Stone,196S) and to empirically derived improvement, recovery, and length of hospitalization rates associated with such disorders (Stone, 1967).…”