Institutional Learning and Change Initiative

Keywords:

clinical impressions; Evaluation; Goal attainment scaling (GAS); ILAC Newsletter; interrater reliability; program evaluation

Abstract:

Goal attainment scaling (GAS) has been considered to be one of the most versatile and appealing evaluation protocols available for human services. Aspects of the protocol that make the method so appealing to practitioners—that is, collaboratively working with individual clients to identify and assign weights to goals they will work to achieve—have produced critical psychometric challenges that have threatened the method's acceptance by funders and researchers. This interrater reliability study of weighted goals contributes to their psychometric validation and therefore to the continued use of a methodology so attractive to practitioners. The subjective clinical impressions of 43 students trained in using GAS has statistically significant scorer reliability. These findings suggest that use of GAS composite scores (weight times the problem level) is a reliable tool and therefore not a reason to discourage the use of GAS as a means for monitoring a client's progress over time.