A Psychometric Evaluation of the Parent Engagement in Evidence-Based Services Questionnaire

Abstract

Despite years of research supporting the efficacy of certain youth mental health treatments over others, actual use of these interventions in everyday clinical practice continues to be low. Most dissemination and implementation efforts to date have focused on increasing demand for and utilization of evidence-based services (EBS) with actual service providers. However, a promising complementary approach for increasing the uptake of EBS involves targeting intervention consumers, namely youth clients and their caregivers. The current study describes a psychometric evaluation of the Parent Engagement in Evidence-Based Services (PEEBS) questionnaire, a new instrument designed to assess parent consumer intent to engage in EBS for their children. First, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with data from 330 participants yielded five factors: (a) Evidence-Informed Action, (b) Barriers to Treatment Engagement, (c) Family Empowerment, (d) Limited Treatment Knowledge, and (e) Openness to Non-EBS. Second, a confirmatory analysis (CFA) with 304 additional participants confirmed the stability of this five- factor structure. Third, with regard to reliability, data across both samples offered evidence of poor to excellent internal consistency (i.e., Cronbach’s alphas of .55 to .94). The final 58-item version of the PEEBS yielded 2-week test-retest reliability coefficients of .44 to .76 in a sample of 47 individuals. Finally, participants completed the PEEBS along with two other measures assessing parent empowerment across settings, and general help-seeking attitudes, intentions, and stigmatization in order to assess convergent and discriminant validity. Results generally indicated that the majority of correlations supported convergence between the PEEBS subscales and these related constructs. Limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.