Threat Control Override (TCO) - Subject Baseline

This measure appears in the following time-points: Baseline.

Related Construct

Mental Health

Description of Measure

The Threat/Control Override Psychotic Symptoms Scale (TCO; Link, Stueve, & Phelan, 1998) is used to measure the presence of three specific psychotic-like symptoms that have been found to have an association with violence in prior research of the link between mental illness and violence. Items from the measure assess the belief that others are seeking to do the adolescent harm, or that outside forces are in control of the adolescent's mind. The adolescent responds to these three items on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from "Never" to "Very Often," with higher scores indicating greater delusional symptoms.

The TCO was found to have adequate internal consistency (alpha = .64) at the baseline time point. Further, confirmatory factor analysis on the baseline data demonstrates that a one-factor model perfectly fits the data (NFI: 1.0 and RMSEA: 0).

One computed score is available:

Count of TCO items [s0tcocnt]

The following individual items are also available:

Past 7 days mind dominated by forces beyond control [S0TCO1]
Past 7 days how often thoughts in head not own [S0TCO2]
Past 7 days how often people wished you to do harm [S0TCO3]

References

Link, B., Andrews, D., and Cullen, F., (1992). The violent and illegal behavior of mental patients reconsidered. American Sociological Review, 57, 275-292.
Link, B., and Stueve, A. (1994). Psychotic symptoms and the violent/illegal behavior of mental patients compared to community controls. In J. Monahan, & H. Steadman, (Eds.), Violence and Mental Disorder: Developments in Risk Assessment, (167-159). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Link, B., Stueve, A., Phelan, J. (1998) Psychotic symptoms and violent behaviors: probing the components of "threat/control-override" symptoms. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 33(suppl 1):S55-S60.