Development and psychometric properties of the Functioning and Recovery Scale: a new measure to assess psychosocial functioning after a suicide attempt

Few measures have been developed to assess the efficacy of community-based suicide prevention and recovery services. The current study aimed to develop a scale to provide accurate assessment and monitoring of functional recovery for people following a recent suicide attempt at The Way Back Support Service in Australia.

The study was conducted in multiple iterative stages: (1) literature review to identify existing scales; (2) structured informant interview with people with lived experience of a suicide attempt; (3) expert survey of researchers, clinicians, and people with lived experience on relevance and acceptability of candidate items; and (4) quantitative survey of the pilot scale to assess psychometric properties.

An 11-item scale assessing recovery in people who have recently attempted suicide was demonstrated to be a unidimensional measure with sound psychometric properties (α = 0.94). The scale was highly acceptable to researchers, clinicians, and people with lived experience. A short-form 6-item scale was also developed.

The Functioning and Recovery Scale is likely to be useful for evaluating suicide prevention programs. No existing scale captures the broad construct of psychosocial functioning with sound psychometric rigor and the involvement of people with lived experience of suicide attempt.