정신과 병실의 치료환경에 대한 평가ᅳ( I ) 병실환경 평가척도의 신뢰도 검사 및 몇가지 변인에 관한 고찰

Assessment of Therapeutic Milieu of Psychiatric Wards ( I) Reliability Test of the Ward Atmosphere Scale (WAS) with the Consideration of Several Variables

The importance of milieu characteristics in inpatient psychiatric treatment programs has been widely recognized and a number of instruments has been developed to measure these milieu characteristics. Among these instruments, the Ward Atmosphere Scale (WAS), which was developed by Dr. Moos and his colleagues in the Social Ecology Laboratory at Stanford University, is one of the most widely used and the most reliable test to assess the social environment of hospital-based psychiatric treatment programs. As it contains characteristics of culture and value systems of the background society which the psychiatric ward is belonged to, it is necessary to assess reliability and applicability of the instrument again before we use generally in clinical application in a different culture. For this reason, the authors administered the Ward Atmosphere Scale to 291 subiects including patients, students and staff from three different psychiatric inpatient wards: Custodial ward(UUW), Medically oriented ward (MOW) and the authors. Therapeutic community (TCW) to assess the reliability of WAS and it’s stability with consideration of several variables. The results were as follows: 1. The WAS is considered to be a reliable test with moderate to substial interal consistencies of item-total and subscale-total in most :cases, and with low subscale-subscale intercorrelations. However, some of item-subscale internal consistencies dropped to the low level of 0.3，suggesting that the revision of several related items w ill be inevitable. 2. From the result of one-way ANOVA, the WAS showed large significant differences between subiects* perceptions by different therapeutic milieu typology (CUW, MOW, TCW) and by different subjects，status (staff, student, patient), but the evidence indicated that these perceptions are not dependent on several background characteristics such as age, sex and admission (working) days.