The assessment of social adjustment. A review of techniques.

Interest in the community adjustment of psychiatric patients has led to the development of rating techniques for its evaluation. Selection of an appropriate scale for the task should include a review of its item content, anchor points, coverage, method of obtaining information, informant, psychometric properties, precision, cost, scoring, and instructional material. While no scale is without limitations, this report describes 15 currently available scales that meet many of the important criteria for assessing social adjustment and are sufficiently developed to be useful in evaluative research. This review also contains a list of pertinent references to the scales and guide to the literature on behavioral rating scales.