Psychosocial problems and outcome: an external validity study

Six acute-care teaching hospitals participated in a study to determine the validity of a problem-outcome classification system. Three hundred and forty-three randomly selected clients of 152 social workers served as external sources to determine the validity of the instrument. In 77 percent of the problems, social workers and clients agreed on the nature of the problem dealt with during intervention. However, workers tended to give more negative values to their assessments of outcome of intervention than did their clients.