The Organizational Financial Context of Publicly-Funded Mental Health Clinics: Development and Preliminary Psychometric Evaluation of the Agency Financial Status Scales

Funding is a major barrier to implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) in publicly-funded community mental health clinics (CMHCs). Understanding how best to deploy implementation strategies that address this barrier requires greater clarity on the financial context within agencies. We developed the Agency Financial Status Scales (AFSS) to assess employee perceptions of the level of three hypothesized and theoretical funding related constructs in organizations: (a) perceptions of financial health, (b) financial attitudes toward EBPs, and (c) strategic financial climate. This investigation serves as a preliminary evaluation of this measure. Participants were 239 therapists and 40 supervisors from 25 publicly-funded CMHCs providing outpatient mental health services for young people. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to investigate the latent trait structure of the items. Internal consistency, interrater agreement, concordance between therapists and supervisors, and convergent validity were also examined. A two-factor model measuring perceptions of financial health and strategic financial climate best fit the data. For both of these scales, alpha reliability was acceptable and agreement statistics provided moderate support for aggregation at the organizational level. Analyses supported the convergent validity of the scales. The development and preliminary evaluation of the AFSS is an important first step in understanding the financial context of publicly-funded CMHCs. Though findings from this investigation are promising, additional development and testing are needed to develop a more thorough understanding of the constructs and to improve the validity and reliability of this measure.