Validation of a behavioral health treatment outcome and assessment tool designed for naturalistic settings: The treatment outcome package

In 1994, the American Psychological Association and the Society for Psychotherapy Research convened a Core Battery Conference to develop a set of criteria for the selection of a universal core battery that could be used as a common outcome tool across all outcome studies. The Treatment Outcome Package (TOP) is a behavioral health assessment and outcome battery with modules for assessing a wide array of behavioral health symptoms and functioning, demographics, case-mix, and treatment satisfaction. It was developed to follow the design specifications set forth by the Core Battery Conference, but also to ensure the battery's applicability to naturalistic treatment settings in which randomization may be impossible. In this article we discuss a number of studies that evaluate the initial psychometrics of the items that comprise the mental health symptom and functional modules of the TOP. We conclude that the TOP has an excellent factor structure, good test-retest reliability, promising initial convergent and discriminant validity, measures the full range of pathology on each scale, and has some ability to distinguish between behavioral health clients and members of the general population. (C) 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.