Development and reliability of a pictorial mental disorders screen for young adolescents

Abstract

Objective: To report psychometric data from preliminary studies of the Adolescent Dominic (AD), a pictorial screen for the most frequent Axis I youth mental disorders.

Methods: We created 113 picture items based on DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria and assessed them for comprehension (sample 1, n = 114; sample 2, n = 40) and reliability (sample 3, n = 128) in a group of adolescents aged 12 to 16 years living in the community. We used the kappa statistic to estimate test-retest reliability of symptoms, criteria and diagnoses, and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) for symptom and criterion scores. We assessed internal consistency of symptom scores with the alpha coefficient.

Results: For symptoms, 54.4% of kappas were higher than 0.60, while only 2% were poor. ICCs for symptom scores yielded higher values (0.81 to 0.89) than for criterion scores (0.51 to 0.86). Internal consistency of symptom scores ranged from 0.52 to 0.83. Kappas for diagnoses ranged from 0.52 to 0.76.

Conclusions: Symptom reliability compared favourably with data from other assessment interviews of youth mental disorders. Following these positive results, a computerized DSM-IV version of the AD has focused on the assessment of symptoms and is currently being tested for reliability and criterion validity.