Is befriending a valuable intervention in schizophrenia? A scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Schizophrenia is a severe, chronic mental disorder that involves disruptions in cognitive processes, emotional responsiveness, and social interactions. Psychotherapeutic and social integration practices have increasingly been added to the pharmacological treatment in an effort to improve the level of functioning and the quality of life of individuals affected by this condition. Befriending, defined as a one-on-one companionship provided by a volunteer who aims to act as an emotionally supportive liaison, is hypothesized to be an effective such intervention, offering support for building and maintaining social relationships in the community. Despite its increase in popularity and acceptance, befriending remains poorly understood and under-researched. Methods: We performed a systematic search for studies targeting befriending either as an intervention or a controlled condition in studies on schizophrenia. Searches were performed in four databases: APA PsycInfo, Pubmed, Medline and EBSCO. The keywords "schizophrenia," AND "befriending," were searched for on all databases. Results: The search yielded 93 titles and abstracts, of which 18 met the criteria for inclusion. The studies included in this review have all incorporated befriending as an intervention or a controlled condition, as per our search criteria, and aimed at depicting the value and feasibility of this intervention to address social and clinical deficits in individuals with schizophrenia. Conclusion: The studies selected for this scoping review revealed inconsistent findings regarding the effect of befriending on overall symptoms and the subjective reporting of quality of life in individuals with schizophrenia. This inconsistency may be attributed to differences between the studies and their specific limitations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.067 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".