ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Forensic Psychiatry
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1566694
Reliability and Validity of the German Version of the Forensic Restrictiveness Questionnaire (FRQ-G)
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Forensic Psychiatry, University Hospital Rostock, Rostock, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Introduction: The Forensic Restrictiveness Questionnaire (FRQ) is a self-administered questionnaire for forensic mental health inpatients about their subjective experiences of restrictiveness. The present paper describes the validation of the German version of the FRQ. Methods: Patients were recruited from eight forensic psychiatric hospitals in Germany. Internal consistency was explored using Cronbach's α. The German version of the EssenCES (assessing ward climate), the MQPLa (assessing quality of life) and the Mental Health Component subscale of the SF-12 were used to explore convergent validity. The Physical Health Component subscale of the SF-12 was used to explore divergent validity. Patient's levels of leave (Lockerungen), substance use behavior and occurrence of incidents were used to describe criterion validity.Results: The analysis indicated very good internal consistency according to Cronbach's α. Convergent validity could be confirmed as the FRQ-G mean score was significantly negatively correlated with the EssenCES mean score and the MQPLa mean scores. No sufficient correlation could be shown for the Mental Health Component of the SF-12. A low correlation was found with the physical component of the SF-12, indicating discriminant validity. Very few significant correlations were found to establish criterion validity.Discussion: The data indicate the FRQ-G to have good construct validity (structural, convergent, divergent) but failed to fully demonstrate criterion validity. Possible reasons include an underpowered sample size and possible measurement errors. Implications for future research are discussed.
Keywords: Forensic Psychiatry, Forensic mental health, questionnaire, validity, Reliability, restrictiveness, patient centered care
Received: 25 Jan 2025; Accepted: 21 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Walde and Völlm. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Peggy Walde, Department of Forensic Psychiatry, University Hospital Rostock, Rostock, Germany
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.