The Community Placement Scale: an adaptation of the Community Competence Scale for placement of the deinstitutionalized mentally ill

The Community Placement Scale (CPS), an abbreviated form of the Community Competence Scale (Anderten, 1979) suitable for placement of deinstitutionalized mental patients in the community, was developed in a combined sample of 87 subjects placed in the community in California and Missouri. Although the Community Competence Scale has shown considerable promise as a placement instrument with the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, a briefer measure is needed in order to increase acceptance by both patients and professional staff. Other improvements sought were determining the acceptability of items to placement personnel nationwide, eliminating nondiscriminating items, and heightening internal consistency reliability of subscales. In a series of discriminant analyses, remaining subscales were used to predict community placement with minimal and maximal degrees of structure. From these analyses, a measure that consisted of 5 subscales and 41 items and required approximately 20 minutes to administer was selected. This short form has many similarities to and a few important differences from the previously published short form.