Adapting the Helpful Responses Questionnaire to Assess Communication Skills Involved in Delivering Contingency Management: Preliminary Psychometrics

Abstract

A paper/pencil instrument, adapted from Miller and colleagues’ (1991) Helpful Responses Questionnaire (HRQ), was developed to assess clinician skill with core communicative aspects involved in delivering contingency management (CM). The instrument presents a single vignette consisting of six points of client dialogue to which respondents write ‘what they would say next.’ In the context of an implementation/effectiveness hybrid trial, 19 staff clinicians at an opiate treatment program completed serial training outcome assessments before, following, and three months after CM training. Assessments included this adaptation of the HRQ, a multiple-choice CM knowledge test, and a recorded standardized patient encounter scored for CM skillfulness. Study results reveal promising psychometric properties for the instrument, including strong scoring reliability, internal consistency, concurrent and predictive validity, test-retest reliability and sensitivity to training effects. These preliminary findings suggest the instrument is a viable, practical method to assess clinician skill in communicative aspects of CM delivery.

Development of motivational interviewing skills in immunization (MISI): a questionnaire to assess MI learning, knowledge and skills for vaccination promotion

“…41 This result is consistent with other studies who adapted the HRQ items for written evaluation of MI skills. 35,39 The inter-coder reliability result confirms that our coding protocol for the open-response is clear and precise. Indeed, a second coder similarly scored the same text responses compared to the first coder.…”

“…Other studies also adapted the HRQ tool and developed their own coding system. 35,39 In this case, we prepared a coding manual for our situational vaccination-specific open-response question so that other coders can evaluate the text response to this question (See Supplementary Data).…”

“…In order to evaluate our immunization-specific MI training protocol, we designed a short written questionnaire to be administered before and after each day of training. Following a careful review of relevant scientific literature on MI evaluation, a preliminary questionnaire was drafted according to the three content areas identified in published studies: [35][36][37][38][39]44 1) MI knowledge acquisition, 2) MI skills application and 3) confidence in practising MI. These three main areas were used to design the Motivational Interviewing Skills in Immunization (MISI) questionnaire.…”

“…34 Few authors suggest written surveys based on the Helpful Response Questionnaire (HRQ) to evaluate MI-related skills, instead using a different coding method adapted for MI-related skills. 35,36 HRQ is a written open-response questionnaire to evaluate respondent empathy, 37 providing an efficient means for assessing respondent ability to generate a response relevant to an open-ended question instead of respondent capacity to discriminate between answers from a list. The HRQ has been validated for use with groups of professionals.…”

Finding harmony so the music plays on: pragmatic trial design considerations to promote organizational sustainment of an empirically-supported behavior therapy

“…As consistent and consequence-free clinical stimuli, SPs are a validated means to produce reliable fidelity estimates for behavior therapy implementation in addiction settings [ 37 ]. In each assessment, the SP interaction was supplemented by an applied CM knowledge instrument [ 38 ], multiple-choice test of CM principles [ 39 ], and adoption readiness scale [ 28 ]. Efforts to minimize setting burden succeeded insofar as all assessments were completed.…”