Validation of the recovery attitudes questionnaire and the opening minds scale for health care providers : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Abstract

A range of measures is used to evaluate interventions designed to shift stigmatising attitudes towards mental health recovery. However, there is mixed evidence on the psychometric properties of these measures and unvalidated measures continue to be used. Methodological issues may contribute to these mixed findings, such as the underreporting of critical measurement information. This study aimed to address these issues in evaluating the factorial validity and reliability of two measures of recovery and stigma attitudes: the 7-item Recovery Attitudes Questionnaire (RAQ-7; Borkin et al., 2000) and the 15-item Opening Minds Scale for Health Care Providers (OMS-HC-15; Kassam et al., 2012; Modgill et al., 2014), through a partial replication of Chiba et al. (2016) and Őri et al. (2020). The measures were completed online by 286 medical sector workers recruited from Prolific Academic, 19 of whom completed them again two weeks later. Confirmatory factor analyses and reliability estimations revealed that the RAQ-7 scores had an unsatisfactory internal and test-retest reliability, and poorly fitted the known two-factor structure. In contrast, the OMS-HC-15 scores demonstrated strong internal consistency, very weak test-retest reliability, mixed fit to the known correlated three-factor structure and weak to moderate support for the interrelationship between the factors. These findings indicate that a more valid and reliable alternative to the RAQ-7 must be used to measure recovery attitudes, whereas the OMS-HC-15 is a viable measure of stigmatising attitudes. Further robust and transparent psychometric validations are needed to integrate personal recovery and mental distress stigma measures into practice.