(PS1-58) Validation of the Recovery Activities Scale (RAS)

Validation of the Recovery Activities Scale (RAS) 

The social learning theory of addiction posits that substance use disorders impact a host of biopsychosocial factors including personal characteristics (e.g., genetics, childhood trauma), substance use (e.g., individual using behaviors), and social environment (e.g., group norms, social reinforcement; Craighead, Miklowitz, & Craighead, 2017; Smith, 2021). Given that both using substances and recovery often occur within one’s social networks and community (Jason et al., 2020; Falade-Nwulia et al., 2022; Mericle, 2014) it is critical to attend to both social and personal factors. While research shows that sustained recovery generally requires adherence to recovery-oriented activities (Beaulieu, 2021), most scales neglect assessment of external or social recovery activities.  

This study seeks to validate the Recovery Activities Scale (RAS) within a population of (N = 295) unhoused adult males residing in a non-hospitalized residential treatment facility for those recovering from addiction. The RAS asked participants to self-report the frequency with which they engaged in recovery-oriented behaviors in the past 12 months. The RAS contains 18 items across five subscales: relapse prevention, sober support, health, social well-being, and independent living. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted using IBM SPSS version 29. All variables' correlations were significantly less than .8, indicating no multicollinearity. A varimax rotation structure was applied to the model extracting four factors with eigenvalues greater than 1, accounting for 56.31% of the variance. Factor loadings ranged from 0.44 to 0.76, with multiple items demonstrating strong loadings ( >. 40) on the four factors indicated by the EFA. A “cross-loading” item is an item that loads at .32 or higher on two or more factors. According to Field (2013), factor loadings less than 0.3 should be suppressed and, scores greater than 0.4 are considered stable.  

The identified factors represent four of the five subscales: relapse prevention, sober support, health, and independent living. Notably, the social well-being subscale was not reflected in these data. This is unsurprising given that the nature of the questions for social well-being may be adequately reflected in the other subscales. These findings have implications for identifying the degree to which individuals are participating in recovery-maintenance activities, especially in shared housing contexts where the impact of sober social networks is likely higher than average.