Life Skills Profile (16-item version)

The original Life Skills Profile (LSP) was developed by a team of clinical researchers (Rosen et al. 1989, Parker et al. 1991) as a brief, specific and jargon-free scale to assess a consumer’s abilities with respect to basic life skills. Work undertaken as part of the Australian Mental Health Classification and Service Costs (MH-CASC) study saw the 39 items reduced to 16. This reduction in item number aimed to minimise the rating burden on clinicians when the measure is used in conjunction with the Health of the NationOutcome Scale (HoNOS).

Example LSP-16 items:

There are four subscales assessed within the LSP-16:

1. Withdrawal: This subscale assesses an individual’s tendency to withdraw from social interactions and activities. It may reflect the extent to which a person prefers solitude or faces challenges in engaging with others.
2. (Lack of) Self-Care: The Self-Care subscale evaluates an individual’s ability to independently manage personal care activities. It includes tasks such as grooming, dressing, and maintaining personal hygiene.
3. (Lack of) Compliance: Compliance measures the degree to which an individual adheres to rules, instructions, or social norms. High scores on this subscale suggest less compliance and rule-abiding behaviour.
4. Anti-Social : The Anti-Social subscale focuses on behaviours that are disruptive, defiant, or contrary to social norms. It assesses tendencies towards antisocial or oppositional conduct.

Higher scores for the total score and subscale scores indicate a greater degree of disability. A total LSP scale score is calculated by adding individual scores for the whole scale together. Therefore, for the LSP-16, the total score can range from 0 to 48. As some items might not be relevant, items are optional and items with missing data are excluded from the calculation. An average score is provided for the total score and subscale scores so that comparisons can be made to determine relative areas of strength of challenges.

There are four subscales in the LSP-16:

1. Withdrawal (items 1, 2, 3, 8): This subscale assesses an individual’s tendency to withdraw from social interactions and activities. It reflects the extent to which a person prefers solitude or faces challenges in engaging with others, where higher scores indicate more social withdrawal.
   
   
2. (Lack of) Self-Care (items 4, 5, 6, 9, 16): The Self-Care subscale evaluates an individual’s ability to independently manage personal care activities. It includes tasks such as grooming, dressing, and maintaining personal hygiene. Higher scores indicate more difficulties with self-care.
3. (Lack of) Compliance (items 10, 11, 12): Compliance measures the degree to which an individual adheres to rules, instructions, or social norms. High scores on this subscale suggest less compliance and rule-abiding behaviour.
   
   
4. Anti-Social (items 7, 13, 14, 15): The Anti-Social subscale focuses on behaviours that are disruptive, defiant, or contrary to social norms. It assesses tendencies towards antisocial or oppositional conduct, with higher scores reflecting more anti-social behaviours.

Plots are presented to show the average score for the first administration and multiple administrations of the LSP-16. The background colours on the plots match up to the response options on the LSP-16 to indicate what response category the average score is closest to (e.g., a score of 1.5 is closer to 2 and so is categorised as “moderate difficulties”).

Taken together, studies examining the psychometric properties of the LSP suggest that it has moderately good content, construct, concurrent and predictive validity; high test-retest and adequate inter-rater reliability; and good sensitivity to change. It also appears to demonstrate feasibility and utility in clinical settings.

A number of studies have examined the internal consistency of the LSP-39, as measured by Cronbach’s alpha. In these studies, the internal consistency has been reported as moderately high with subscale and total score alphas ranging from 0.64 to 0.88 (Parker et al., 1991; Rosen et al., 1989; Trauer et al., 1995) and 0.93 to 0.94 (Dickenson & Coursey, 2002; Trauer et al., 1995) respectively. The Communication subscale has been shown to have the poorest internal consistency (Parker et al., 1991; Rosen et al., 1989).

The LSP has been shown to perform well against the Health of the Nation Outcome Scales (HoNOS; Parker et al., 2002; Trauer et al., 2004; Wooff et al., 2003), the Katz Adjustment Scale (KAS; Parker et al., 1991), the Multnomah Communities Ability Scale (MCAS; Dickenson & Coursey, 2002), the Strauss-Carpenter Levels of Functioning Scale (LOF ; Dickenson & Coursey, 2002), the Global Assessment of Functioning Scale (GAF; Dickenson & Coursey, 2002; Parker et al., 2002; Simon et al., 2003), the Quality of Life Scale (QOL; Norman et al., 2000), 112 and the Global Assessment Scale (GAS; Wooff et al., 2003).