Assessing Drug Abuse Treatment and Rehabilitation Through Psychological Functioning, Mental Wellbeing, and Life Satisfaction: Scales Adaptation and Development

Drug abuse is one of the perennial global pandemics since the 1960s, and persons who use drugs (PWUDs) have been subjected to an array of treatment courses and rehabilitation efforts. This study underscored the adaptation and development of assessment tools to measure progress among PWUDs undertaking drug abuse treatment and rehabilitation through these frontiers. Based on the literature, people engaging in illicit drug use often experience difficulties in terms of their affective, behavioral, and cognitive functioning as well as in their mental wellbeing and life satisfaction. Hence, through a Bootstrap Approach to test construction and guided by strict ethical procedures, 100 college students and 100 PWUDs from a treatment and rehabilitation center were selected to estimate the psychometric properties of the adapted Warwick-Edinburg Mental Wellbeing Scale (Tennant et al., 2007) and Life Satisfaction Scale (Deiner et al., 1985) and the developed Psychological Functioning Scale. Based on Pearson r statistics, the translations of the W-EMWS, r(92) = 0.95, p < 0.01, and the LSS, r(92) = 0.82, p < 0.01, were statistically accurate. Cronbach’s alphas of both tests were also very strong (W-EMWS: α = 0.92; LSS: α = 0.87) similar with the subscales of the PFS (affective: α = 0.87; behavioral: α = 0.66; cognitive: α = 0.89). These results indicated that the three scales are all statistically sound and thus can be used to reliably measure the progress of the PWUDs who are recovering from illicit drug use. Pertinent conclusions were thereby drawn, and various recommendations were duly suggested.