[New questionnaire to evaluate psychological treatment effects]

A new questionnaire named CBA-VE (Cognitive Behavioral Assessment for outcome evaluation) was developed to evaluate psychological treatment intervention--especially for counseling and psychotherapy. The questionnaire has 80 items and a 5 point Likert-like scale ranging from 1 = nothing to 5 = a lot. The aim of this study was to evaluate the validity and the reliability of the five constructs of the questionnaire both in normal and clinical subjects. Participants. Two samples were analyzed: a "Normal" group composed of 250 normal adults plus 51 university students; and a "Clinical" group including 261 adults undergoing psychotherapy and psychological counseling provided by the public health service. The questionnaire includes five scales: three of them are related to important psychological aspects (anxiety, depression, and psychological distress); the remaining two are measurements of psychological wellbeing and self-perception of a positive change. The questionnaire has excellent psychometric characteristics, both for normal and clinical subjects. We observed a good reliability, good internal consistency, and an excellent structural validity for the five interrelated dimensions. The normalized factorial loadings are consistent, significant (from around 0.6 up), and similar in both the groups. The so-called Clinical group showed higher scores in anxiety, depression, and psychological distress and smaller scores in wellbeing and change perception. This is coherent with what the authors assumed a priori.