Family Accommodation Questionnaire—Modified (FAQ–M)
The FAQ–M is a modified version of the Family Accommodation Questionnaire (FAQ; Calvocoressi et al., 1995), a 13-item self-report measure originally developed to assess the frequency of accommodating behavior in response to a family member with OCD. To make the FAQ applicable to the broader class of anxiety disorders, the wording of items was changed to refer to “anxiety symptoms” rather than “obsessive-compulsive disorder,” and OCD-specific items (e.g., “How often did you provide objects for your partner’s compulsions?”) were removed. The FAQ–M assessed husbands’ participation in symptom-related behavior, changes in routine due to wives’ anxiety symptoms, and distress caused by symptom accommodation. The original FAQ correlated highly with relevant subscales of the Questionnaire on Resources and Stress for Families with Chronically Ill or Handicapped Members (Calvocoressi et al., 1995). Alpha in our sample was .82.
Patient Rejection Scale (PRS; Kreisman, Simmens, & Joy, 1979)
The PRS is an 11-item questionnaire assessing family hostility, a central component of expressed emotion and a demonstrated predictor of relapse (Hooley, 1985). Items are statements concerning the husband’s perceptions of the wife (e.g., “I get more irritated with her as time goes on”). Husbands were asked to rate the frequency with which these statements apply to them on a scale from 0 (never) to 2 (often). Items were summed to calculate a total score. Alpha in our sample was .60.
Husbands completed two additional questionnaires assessing levels of anxiety, depression and general psychological distress:
The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory: Trait version (STAI–T; Spielberger, 1983)
A 20-item scale used to assess the degree to which husbands feature a stable tendency to experience anxiety and depression. The trait scale of the STAI has been shown to have high convergent validity and test–retest reliability (Spielberger, 1983). Bieling, Antony, and Swinson (1998) identified two sub-scales of the STAI–T: (a) STAI–D (13 items), which loaded highly on a depression-content trait factor, and (b) STAI–A (seven items), which loaded highly on an anxiety-content trait factor. In the present sample, alphas for the STAI–D and STAI–A were .90 and .71, respectively.
The Symptom Checklist–90–Revised (SCL–90–R; Derogatis, 1983)
A 90-item measure of psychological symptom distress in the past week, with each item rated on a 5-point Likert scale from 0 (not at all) to 4 (extremely). We used the Global Severity Index (GSI), a mean score of all responses, to reflect levels of general symptom distress among husbands. Raw GSI scores of 0.57 or above have been shown to reflect clinically significant symptom distress (Schauenburg & Strack, 1999). Alpha was .88.
Persecution Live 