Psychologists' role in functional assessment of rehabilitation patients

In this study attention was paid to the psychological criteria that clinicians may use when assessing global functioning of rehabilitation patients. Global functioning was understood to be determined by physical, psychological and social factors and was operationally defined as performance in three different areas of life: work, daily activities and human relations. The psychological factors whose relationships to global functioning were studied were three components of personality dynamics:--mental health, cognitive skills and motivation. Patients' mental health, cognitive abilities, motivation and global functioning were clinically rated on the basis of data given by psychological interview, psychological test-results and other information. Correlation analysis showed that the clinicians tend to use the mental health state, the level of cognitive performance and the degree of motivation as criteria when assessing the functioning of rehabilitation patients during the rehabilitation examination. However, multiple regression analysis showed that these psychological variables explained as little as 32% of the variance in follow-up functioning. This is in agreement with the biopsychosocial view that psychological factors are only one class of events manifesting in illness, functioning and behavior.