Florida Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory: development, reliability, and validity

Abstract

The Florida Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (FOCI) is a new self-report questionnaire that has separate scales for symptom enumeration (The Checklist) and evaluation of symptom severity (Severity Scale). The present research investigated the FOCI in a sample of 113 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The results indicated that the FOCI Severity Scale is internally consistent (alpha = .89) and highly correlated with the total score from the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS; Goodman et al., 1989 a). The correlations of the FOCI Severity Scale with measures of depression and global severity of psychopathology were similar to those obtained with the Y-BOCS Total Severity Score. The FOCI Symptom Checklist had adequate reliability (K-R 20 = .83) and moderate correlations (rs < .45) with the FOCI Severity Scale, the Y-BOCS scales, and measures of depression and severity of psychopathology. These findings imply concurrent validity for the FOCI Severity Scale. A strength of the FOCI is that it offers a quick evaluation of both presence and severity of OCD symptoms. An important limitation is that the FOCI does not assess the severity of individual symptoms.