RESUMO
OBJECTIVES: Patient's behavior features are important factors which influences the clinical judgement including diagnosis. However, most psychiatrists build up a picture of patients' behavior from an amalgamation of their own brief observations and nurses' reports, which often lack in the objectiveness. Several behavioral scales have been developed to alleviate this difficulty, but the poor efficiency and reliability of these scales have made them less useful. The recently developed Ward Daily Behavior Scale is an objective tool for evaluating all the daily noteworthy behaviors of patients, and is easily applicable to wide ranges of diagnoses and ages. This study tried to prove the reliability and validity of the Ward Daily Behavior Scale-Korean version. METHODS: The 112 patients, 63 males and 49 females, at a chronic psychiatric inpatient ward were selected as subjects. Experienced and unexperienced nurses rated patients' behaviors independently with the Ward Daily Behavior Scale-Korean version, after observing behaviors of subjects for 8 hours during day duty time. And then we tested the inter-rater reliability, internal consistency, and concurrent validity of this scale. RESULTS: The Ward Daily Behavior Scale-Korean version proved to be both reliable and valid for measuring of behaviors of psychiatric inpatients. CONCLUSIONS: The Ward Daily Behavior Scale-Korean version will be a valuable tool to observe and quantify patients' behavior in psychiatric wards.