Constructing Well-Being Measures using a Recovery from Mental Illness and CPBR Approaches

Policies and practices promoting recovery from mental health problems requires research to go beyond service utilization and symptom analysis. The capabilities approach facilitates a redefinition of outcomes from symptoms and units of services to the multitude of wellbeing dimensions from the perspective of persons with such lived experience. We will report on a project that constructs multi-dimensional measures for persons with psychiatric disorders as compared to persons without. The project team consists of persons with varying combinations of their own psychiatric disorder experience and academic credentials. To determine what relevant valued dimensions to include, concept mapping was employed. Concept mapping collects information on a specific question using a structured discussion group, combined with multivariate statistical analyses tools. Over three meetings with persons self-identifies with psychiatric disorder experience, well-being dimensions were generated, assigned importance scores, sorted into similar clusters, and assigned each cluster a preference score. The project team matched items to questions asked in 1997/1998 and 2000/2001 waves of the Healthcare for Communities Survey. Using the HCC data, preference weights and poverty thresholds estimates are calculated as well as single dimensional measures based solely on income. Multidimensional well-being measure results will be presented and discussed for persons with lived experience and those without; for persons with schizophrenia compared to persons with other psychiatric disorders, for those with co-occurring substance abuse disorders and those with just the psychiatric disorders. Implications are drawn on community-based participatory research and on the process of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in multidimensional poverty assessments.