A validity scale for the Sharp consumer satisfaction scales.

Because of the apparently inflated scores commonly reported for consumer satisfaction with mental health services, we developed a 5-item validity scale for the SHARP questionnaire. The scale discriminated significantly (P less than .001) between those former clients who offered suggestions for improvement of services and those who did not (N = 38). In another experiment, the scale significantly improved the ability to predict the 46 clients' true scores from their obtained scores via stepwise regression (p less than .01). Weights were obtained from that sample of former clients, which significantly reduced the deviation of the obtained satisfaction scores from the true scores, with all p less than .05. In two successive experiments (N = 49 and 26), weights were applied to new samples, significantly reducing deviation from the criterion scores for 5 of the 6 scales (p less than .05), and new weights were then derived. A final set of weights was derived from the combined samples of the three experiments, (N = 121) which significantly improved prediction of the criterion and lowered the mean on all scales, with all p less than .05.