The Functional Outcomes Core (FC) of the Center for Neurocognition and Emotion in Schizophrenia will serve two purposes. First, it will be an infrastructure element that will provide a range of service functions for the Center's scientific activities. The goal of these services will be to provide the Center with the best strategies for measuring psychosocial and functional outcomes for individuals with schizophrenia. Second, it will establish a scientific agenda focused on the continued development and psychometric testing of measures relevant to functional outcomes in schizophrenia. The FC will have eight aims that include both service aims and scientific aims. There will be six service aims. 1. To house and maintain a set of measures that can be used by studies in the Center when they require functional outcome assessments. These measures will reflect a conceptual model of functional outcome that will be intrinsic to the FC. 2. To serve as the training unit for research personnel who will use the functional outcome measures across projects in the Center. 3. To have a series of quality assurance and data monitoring protocols that can be used to maintain data quality throughout the course studies in the Center. 4. To provide ongoing consultation to studies while they are in the data-gathering phase related to any of the instruments that are supported by the FC. 5. To assist investigators in constructing data elements and constructs from a range of functional outcome data that are common across studies, or that might be uniquely required by certain studies in the Center. 6. To facilitate a series of discussion seminars where various Center investigators can come together to discuss the Center's evolving needs when it comes to functional outcome assessment, as well as to assist the FC in maintaining the most relevant functional outcome assessment protocols. The scientific agenda of the FC will encompass two aims that are critical to the field of functional outcome assessment for individuals with schizophrenia. 7. To further specify and develop a set of functional assessment measures and measurement models that represent constructs that are meaningful to clinical, behavioral, and biosocial studies in schizophrenia. 8. To continue to assess the psychometric viability of the Core measures, paying particular attention to ecological validity, and the invariance of these measures and measurement models across samples, across time in longitudinal studies, and across phases of the disorder.
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