Title: An Adaptation of Perceived Causal Networks for Children and Adolescents (PECAN-CA): An Evaluation of its Reliability and Feasibility - Child Psychiatry & Human Development
PECAN should be used as a decision making process for therapy personalization. It gives the possibility to quantify the centrality and other quantitaive measures of the importance of a symptom and other symptoms. It has advantages against the statistical methods since it is not that time consuming and derives percieved causal networks. PECAN should be delivered to adolescents through intake interviews, as it’s more reliable.
This study created a version of PECAN for children and adolescents (Pilot study: 8-17y. It works best 10-17.) They get asked to recall symptoms they experienced during a recent social situation. In the PECAN methodology the first thing they do is to show 1) a psychoeducational video about network theory and then 2) the start with the symptom identification: first they have a blank card and write any symptoms they think are important (open report). Than there is a set of symptom cards each containing a definition and an example. These symptoms could be disorder-specific or transdiagnostic. 3) Afterwards the symptoms get reduction and clarification 4) Each symptom gets evaluated in a VAS from 0-10 5) Contextual variables get added with freely reported external factors 6) For each green symptom and external factor it gets asked which other symptoms influence it and how it relates to other symptoms by varying thickness from 1 to 5 CAVE: they talk about symptoms, not problems!
The centrality of the symptoms was assessed reliably. Feasibility: Psychoeducation and symptom selection is feasible, but causal relations is less feasible. Moderators: 1) older participants found PECAN-CA more feasible and produced more reliable networks (best suited for adolescents) 2) selecting fewer symptoms during the networks increased reliability (best 6 o fewer). Intelligence and social desirability showed no significant influence.