The Development and First Use of the QUEST Measures to Evaluate School Nurses' Knowledge and Skills for Depression Recognition and Management

Abstract

Citation: Haddad, M. & Tylee, A. (2013). The development and first use of the QUEST measures to evaluate school nurses' knowledge and skills for depression recognition and management. Journal of School Health, 83(1), pp. 36-44. doi: 10.1111/j.1746-1561.2012.00745.x This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent Abstract BackgroundDepression affects around 5% of adolescents and its identification and management is an important part of front-line professionals' roles, but there is a lack of validated measures of knowledge and skills in this area. This study developed and tested a multiple choice question set for school nurses' depression knowledge and a series of vignettes to examine case recognition skills. MethodsRelevant literature and an expert panel worked to develop a 24-item knowledge test, and 12 vignettes. Three rounds of panel review assessed face and content validity, and expert agreement of vignette depression status. The measures were piloted with 26 school nurses and, following amendments, used with 146 school nurses. A depression attitude scale was used concurrently so associations between knowledge, attitudes and condition recognition could be explored. ResultsThere was an overall satisfactory participant performance on the knowledge measure with 50% correct answers, and less than 5% unanswered. Item analysis indicated most items had adequate difficulties and discriminations. The panel reached overall 89% agreement about the depression status of the vignettes. The vignettes were found to be acceptable and feasible for completion and participant judgments achieved 65% sensitivity and 47% specificity. ConclusionThe present study has developed psychometrically tested instruments for measuring depression recognition and knowledge. There was evidence for content validity, and limited evidence of convergent validity from associations between measures. Results indicate that several of the questionnaire items may be modified, and that a smaller set of vignettes with clearest expert agreement may be useful in future research.

Improving the physical health of people with severe mental illness in a low secure forensic unit: An uncontrolled evaluation study of staff training and physical health care plans

“…Most of the knowledge items requested selection of either a single correct response from alternatives, or indicating 'true' or 'false' in relation to a statement, but for three items, participants were asked to identify two correct answers from the alternatives, providing a total possible score of 15. The item difficulty index (the percentage of correct responses to the item with missing responses scored as incorrect) for each question was examined, and ranged between 0.11 and 0.93, with an overall mean of 0.56 (the chance level is 0.50 for a true/false question, and the optimal difficulty level is 0.75; while for a 4 alternative item, the random level is 0.25 and the optimal difficulty level is 0.625) (Haddad & Tylee 2013).…”

The effect of a training programme on school nurses’ knowledge, attitudes, and depression recognition skills: The QUEST cluster randomised controlled trial

“…The development of the QUEST measures for depression knowledge and detection are fully described in a previous publication (Haddad & Tylee 2013). In short, these were developed from a review of the literature including clinical guidelines for depression management, mental health literacy materials, and previously developed tests, together with a series of panel group consultations with a group (n = 21) comprised of school nurses, clinical academics, mental health charity staff, and a service user.…”

“…Items were of multiple choice format with a total possible score of 22. The item difficulty index -the percentage of correct responses for each item, with higher values indicating greater ease -ranged between 0.19 to 0.89, with a mean level of 0.48 (Haddad & Tylee 2013).…”

Validation of the Korean Parental Depression Literacy Scale

“…Although mental health literacy is positively associated with help seeking, many studies in this area have used tools with little information about their psychometric properties (Wei et al 2017). An exception is the study of Haddad and Tylee (2013), who developed an instrument to measure knowledge and recognition of depression; however, this tool was designed for, and tested with, school nurses. A recent systematic review by Wei et al (2017) compared the psychometric properties of five depression literacy scales and found that only the Depression Literacy (D-Lit) Scale (Griffiths et al 2004;Gulliver et al 2012) had been used for the general population, and that only its internal consistency results were reported (Gulliver et al 2012;Kiropoulos et al 2011).…”

“…). An exception is the study of Haddad and Tylee (), who developed an instrument to measure knowledge and recognition of depression; however, this tool was designed for, and tested with, school nurses. A recent systematic review by Wei et al .…”