DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF PSYCHIATRIC WARD SETTINGS ON PATIENT CHANGE

Abstract

Twelve psychiatric patients were observed in and were asked to descibe their reactions to six psychiatric ward subsettings (e.g., individual therapy, community meeting, free time) both during their 1st or 2nd week of hospitalization and during the week before they left the ward. The results showed that persons and person by setting interactions accounted for substantial proportions, whereas consistent differences between settings accounted for very little of the variance in change scores. This indicates that there are only small general differential effects of ward subsettings, but that instead settings elicit differential amounts of therapeutic change in different patients. Implications discussed include that different psychiatric ward subsettings may be differentially beneficial to different groups of patients, that conclusions about therapeutic change drawn about a patient from observations in one setting may not generalize to other settings, and that the findings bear on the upper limit of intercorrelations of different change scores obtained on the same individuals.