Measuring Community Participation Among Japanese with Serious Mental Illnesses

Community participation is associated with physical, cognitive, and mental health benefits for people with serious mental illnesses (SMI) and is recognized as a critical component of health functioning. Developing reliable measurement of participation in different cultural contexts and languages is important to expanding knowledge in this area. The aim of this study was to translate a psychometrically sound English-language community participation measure into Japanese and examine its test-reliability with a population of Japanese people with SMI. Self-reported data were gathered twice from 253 individuals within 48 h using the Temple University Community Participation-Japanese version (TUCP-J) at Type-B Continuous Employment Support Centers in Japan between November 2020 and February 2021. Participant responses were similar on four of the five participation subscales. At the item-level, participants provided consistent responses on 26 out of 27 of the items about amount of participation and had high item-level concordance (77-93%) on their ratings of the importance (Yes; No) of each participation activity and their reported participation sufficiency (Enough; Not Enough; Too Much: 73-88%). Overall, the results demonstrated strong evidence of test-retest reliability of the TUCP-J and identified a number of areas that were important to respondents, but where they were reporting not doing enough.