In clinical practice we often get in the routine of administering the same assessments, just because we’re familiar with them. This post will help you get familiar with a new test; the Valuing Questionnaire, which I’ve just added to the NovoPsych library.
Used with: Adolescents and Adults
Measures: How consistently someone is living with their values.
Helpful for: Tracking progress in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
The Valuing Questionnaire (VQ: Smout et al. 2014) is a 10-item self-report scale designed to measure how consistently an individual has been living with their self-determined values and is particularly helpful when administered during a course of ACT.
Values are personal principles someone has chosen to guide their behaviour. Articulation of self-defined values is a core component of ACT-like therapies, and this scale is best used in conjunction with and subsequent to this process in therapy. The VQ measures “valuing”, which refers to actions one takes to live in accordance with values, rather than simply pleasant outcomes or satisfaction with life.
It measures two constructs:
1. Progress, defined as enactment of values, perseverance, and including clear awareness of what is personally important.
2. Obstruction, which reflects the disruption of valued living due to avoidance of unwanted experience, distraction from values by inattention to values or undue attention to distress.
Here are the 10 questions:
Scoring and Interpretation
Two subscale scores are presented, Progress and Obstruction, which typically have a negative correlation.
— Progress (items, 3, 4, 5, 7,9. Range = 0 to 30).
— Obstruction (items 1, 2, 6, 8, 10. Range = 0 to 30).
Scores indicative of psychological health are high scores on the Progress scale accompanied by low scores on the Obstruction scale.
As well as raw scores being presented, percentile ranks compared to an undergraduate university sample and a clinical sample are presented. A percentile of 50 on the clinical sample on each subscale represents a typical score for people presenting to outpatient psychology clinics.
When used as a monitoring tool during a course of ACT, successful treatment is indicated by increasing Progress Scores and decreasing Obstruction Scores.
Here is some sample results. The graph shows the scores changing over the course four sessions.
I hope you’ll spend some time getting to know this test, among others. More information on NovoPsych assessments can be found here.
Smout, M., Davies, M., Burns, N., & Christie, A. (2014). Development of the valuing questionnaire (VQ). Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 3(3), 164-172.