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Endicott Work Productivity Scale (EWPS): A New Measure to Assess Treatment Effects1
Jean Endicott, Ph.D. and John Nee, Ph.D.2,3
Abstract
The Endicott Work Productivity Scale (EWPS) is a brief self-report questionnaire designed to enable investigators to obtain a sensitive measure of work productivity. The total score is based on the degree to which behaviors and subjective feelings or attitudes that are likely to reduce productivity and efficiency in work activities characterize the subject during the week before evaluation. The total score was found to be reliable and valid within a group of depressed outpatients and a group of nonpatients in the community. The EWPS score is related to, but not redundant with, measures of overall severity of illness and severity of depression in these samples. The EWPS shows considerable promise as an easily used, brief, and sensitive measure for assessing the effects on work performance of various disorders and the efficacy of different therapeutic interventions.
Introduction
In the past, most efforts to assess the effectiveness of treatment of mental disorders focused on the relief of symptoms and general impairment in functioning. In recent years there has been greater interest in the impact of illness on social and role functioning, particularly with regard to work productivity and efficiency (Frank Nc Manning 1992; Greenberg et al. 1993). Unfortunately, most of the commonly used measures of work performance are limited to numbers of hours or days missed from work, summary scale judgments of the level of satisfaction with work performance, or scale judgments of the level of overall work performance based on the subject's own account. For example, the self-report form of the Social Adjustment Scales (Weissman et al. 1978) has an item, "Have you been able to do your work in the last two weeks?" The response choices range from 0=I did my work very well, to 4= I did my work poorly all of the time. Similarly, the commonly used Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D; Hamilton 1960) has only one item that combines work and activities, and the response choices range from 0=No difficulty, to 4 Stopped working because of present illness.
While days missed from work and items such as the above reflect change in the level of impairment...