Psychometric properties of the Peer Proficiency Assessment (PEPA): A tool for evaluation of undergraduate peer counselors' motivational interviewing fidelity

Abstract

Despite the expanding use of undergraduate student peer counseling interventions aimed at reducing college student drinking, few programs evaluate peer counselors' competency to conduct these interventions. The present research describes the development and psychometric assessments of the Peer Proficiency Assessment (PEPA), a new tool for examining Motivational Interviewing adherence in undergraduate student peer delivered interventions. Twenty peer delivered sessions were evaluated by master and undergraduate student coders using a cross-validation design to examine peer based alcohol intervention sessions. Assessments revealed high inter-rater reliability between student and master coders and good correlations between previously established fidelity tools. Findings lend support for the use of the PEPA to examine peer counselor competency. The PEPA, training for use, inter-rater reliability information, construct and predictive validity, and tool usefulness are described.

A Pilot Study of Two Supervision Approaches for Peer-Led Alcohol Interventions With Mandated College Students

“…This puzzled us, as previous research has linked both global and microskills scores to drinking reductions in treatment-seeking and non-treatment-seeking college students (e.g., Apodaca et al, 2013;Tollison et al, 2008Tollison et al, , 2013. On the one hand, we found that MI global scores were rated below threshold competency, similar to those in previously published studies using peer counselors (e.g., Turrisi et al, 2009). However, although other studies examining peer counselor MI microskills have consistently found increases in drinking related to lower level skill demonstration (Tollison et al, 2008(Tollison et al, , 2013, we did not fi nd this relationship.…”

“…Past studies have found that consequences remained unchanged despite reductions in drinking behaviors (Larimer et al, 2001;Mastroleo et al, 2010;Turrisi et al, 2009); the current study is the fi rst to offer support for peer-led BASICS as a harm-reduction approach. It may be the combination of peer-led BASICS and targeting a mandated student population that helps to explain this fi nding.…”

“…The PEPA (Mastroleo et al, 2009) was developed and validated specifi cally for the evaluation of peer counseling sessions. The current study used graduate student coders who completed training, received coding supervision, and had more than 100 hours of previous supervised coding experience.…”

“…The fi nal BASICS role-play was coded for microskills using the Peer Proficiency Assessment (PEPA; Mastroleo et al, 2009) and the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity scale (MITI; Moyers et al, 2007) to record MI global profi ciency. After we evaluated baseline skills, peer counselor assignment to the EAA or CPA group was conducted as a two-step process, with the goal of balancing groups on MI skills demonstration and gender.…”

Selecting an optimal instrument to identify active ingredients of the motivational interviewing-process

“…Two instruments measure through client opinion [22,37], and not through observations (criterion 3), and three instruments collect information with a low level of detail [21,23,36] (criterion 4). Finally, one instrument incorporates an other instrument (the MITI) to measure the MI-elements [35]. The eleven papers reporting on these ten instruments were excluded.…”