Abstract

SANTOS, Adriana Carvalho dos; ENEAS, Maria Leonor Espinosa  and  YOSHIDA, Elisa Medici Pizão. Stages of change: correlation between two forms of evaluation. Psicol. teor. prat. [online]. 2012, vol.14, n.3, pp. 134-139. ISSN 1516-3687.

The concept of stages of change helps to identify how aware one is about his or her challenge and how confident to facing it. There are six stages: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance and termination. This study aims to verify the correlation between two ways of evaluate them: the Stage of Change Scale (SCS), a self-report instrument, and a clinical interview. It was hypothesized that a high degree of correlation between them would suggest they measure the same construct. The SCS was applied before a clinical interview with 30 adults, who authorized the audio recording in a training clinic. The interviews were transcribed and evaluated by two judges who obtained the agreement of 0.80. Results pointed to a statistically significant but moderate correlation between both measures (rs = 0.40, p < 0.05). Initial results suggest that the management of the interviews may interfere with the identification of stages of change by clinical interview.

Keywords : motivation; therapeutic change; scales; validation study; training clinics.

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