Measuring practitioners' beliefs, goals, and practices in psychiatric rehabilitation.

This article reports on a scale to measure the psychiatric rehabilitation beliefs, goals, and practices of staff who provide services to consumers. The scale's reliability, validity, and factor structure are presented based upon 469 staff members and 191 people in rehabilitation. The scale appears to be a stable measure of staff members' knowledge of modern psychiatric rehabilitation beliefs, goals, and practices as elaborated by the field's leadership. It also appears to provide a valid measure of staff members' actual practice patterns as they relate to the consumer outcomes of empowerment, quality of life, independent living, and competitive employment. Consumers, program administrators, educators, researchers, and practitioners may find the scale useful as a measure of some of the beliefs, goals, and practices that currently define modern psychiatric rehabilitation.