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those forms of psychiatric disorder which may have relevance to a patient's presence in a medical clinic, so that its focus must be on psychological components of ill-health."
(Goldberg and Williams 1988 p.1).
Test items were chosen to distinguish between psychiatric cases and non-cases, to detect breaks in normal function and the appearance of new phenomena of a distressing nature. It is deemed sensitive to transient disorders which may remit without treatment and although not designed to detect functional psychoses such as schizophrenia or psychotic depression, Goldberg and Williams (1988) report that these conditions are usually detected. Originally designed as a 60 item instrument, the GHQ was reduced to a number of shorter versions with only a small reduction in the validity and reliability coefficients and with some loss in percentage sensitivity and specificity. The 12 item version was the one chosen for routine clinical use at Leeds due to its relative brevity and the redundancy of items in the 60 item version for the purpose of screening where more intensive examination can take place (Goldberg and Williams 1988 p. 61); the 12 item version was thought to be the most acceptable and least intrusive in routine clinical practice while retaining the essential purpose for which the instrument was designed. In the original validation of the Leeds Dependence Questionnaire where the GHQ was used as a criterion measure, Raistrick et al. (1994) reported significant correlations between GHQ scores and LDQ scores for the opiate and the alcohol total samples (r=.33, p<.05 and r=.51, p<.001 respectively) and in the follow-up samples significant correlations were found for the opiate sample at intake (r=.44, p<.05) and follow-up (r=.56, p<.01) but for the alcohol sample only at follow-up (r=.70, p<.001) (Raistrick et. al. 1994 pp. 568-569).
The method of scoring the GHQ used in both the present study and the validation of the LDQ study was 0-0-1-1 for the four possible response choices (see Appendix 14).
7.2.4 The Social Satisfaction Questionnaire
The Social Satisfaction Questionnaire (SSQ) aims, as the title suggests, to measure social satisfaction and was adapted from the 33 item Social Problem Questionnaire (SPQ) (Corney and Clare 1985) which was designed as “a compact, comprehensible, valid and reliable self-report questionnaire which can screen individuals in primary care or related settings who are particularly at risk for manifesting social maladjustment and / or dysfunction” (p. 638). Recognising the difficulties inherent in attempts to measure and compare objective social circumstances, the SPQ
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