Development of a Model and Measure of Process-Oriented Quality of Care for Substance Abuse Treatment

The development of a detailed model of substance-abuse treatment (SAT) staff performance is described. The model describes the key behaviors of SAT staff. Specifically, researchers used the critical incident technique to develop the model, which includes a total of 15 dimensions, nested under four meta-dimensions: providing clinical services, employee citizenship behaviors, providing clinical support, and managerial behavior. Development and validation of a measure based on the model are also described. More than 600 SAT staff members in 51 SAT agencies completed the new measure. Factor analyses supported the measure’s hypothesized dimensional structure; high internal consistency reliabilities were observed for all scales; and interrater agreement metrics indicated an acceptable level of within-agency agreement. Moreover, the measure correlated in expected and theoretically consistent ways with measures of job satisfaction and other job-related opinions.