SWAP Research Paper Sample

2. Method

2.1. Participants

Participants in this study were 52 patients consecutively admitted for ongoing individual psychotherapy at a university-based community outpatient clinic. The SWAP is a tool developed for clinicians' use in assessing patients' personality characteristics. Therefore, testing its construct validity among a population sample of patients is suitable for the goals of this research. For a demographic and diagnostic distribution of this sample, please see Table 1. As Table 1 shows, the vast majority (about 80%) of patients participating in the study met the criteria for a DSM-IV Axis I disorder, and the majority of patients (about 65%) met the criteria for either an anxiety disorder or a mood disorder.

Patients were accepted

SWAP-200 (Westen and Shedler, 1999a; 1999b).The SWAP-200 arranges a set of 200 personality descriptions into eight different categories. The categories range from 0, meaning irrelevant or inapplicable to this patient, to 7, meaning highly descriptive of the patient. Based on the ratings of these 200 items, personality disorders (e.g., avoidant personality disorder), personality syndromes Q-factors (e.g., dysphoric), and personality trait dimensions (e.g., social anxiety/avoidance) can be assessed. The present study specifically examined the Social Anxiety/Avoidance Scale, which has been added to the latest most recent edition of the SWAP (SWAP-II; Westen et al., 2014). One of the items on this subscale had not been previously included in the original SWAP-200 used by the therapists in this study. Therefore, we used 8 out of the 9 items of the social anxiety/avoidance scale in our examination. The missing item was item 69: "Decisions and actions are unduly influenced by efforts to avoid perceived dangers; is more concerned with avoiding harm than pursuing desires." An unexpected benefit of using the earlier version of the SWAP (the SWAP-200) instead of the SWAP-II is that the therapists who participated in this study were blind to the Social Anxiety/Avoidance Scale (which was not part of the SWAP-200), and were thus necessarily blind to the retrospective hypothesis of this study. Blagov et al. (2012) examined the retest reliability SWAP scales and found an average of 0.85 test-retest correlation. For a full list of the items included in the SWAP-200 items included in the SAAS and their factor loadings on this scale, see Table