The Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children-Revised Version (DISC-R): III. Concurrent criterion validity

• Published in: Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Vol. 32; no. 3; p. 658
• Main Authors: Piacentini, J, Shaffer, D, Fisher, P, Schwab-Stone, M, Davies, M, Gioia, P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.05.1993
• Subjects: Adolescent; Age Factors; Algorithms; Child; Female; Humans; Male; Mental Disorders - diagnosis; Psychiatric Status Rating Scales - standards; Psychiatric Status Rating Scales - statistics & numerical data; Reproducibility of Results
• ISSN: 0890-8567
• DOI: 10.1097/00004583-199305000-00025

To examine the concurrent criterion validity of the Revised Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC-R), a structured lay-administered instrument designed for use in community studies, under conditions designed to provide strict controls for information and method variance. The DISC-R was compared with a semistructured clinical interview that covered a similar information base as the DISC-R, used standardized ratings to record symptom information, and, similar to the DISC-R, was scored by DSM-III-R-based computerized diagnostic algorithms. Subjects were 74 child and adolescent clinic attendees and their adult custodians. Overall, moderate levels of agreement were found between DISC-R and clinician-generated diagnoses; these findings were tempered, however, by the fact that the validation interview was less reliable than the DISC-R. Although these findings provide preliminary support for the use of the DISC-R, they cast some doubt on the adequacy of clinician-generated diagnoses as validation criteria and suggest that alternate approaches to the assessment of validation should be pursued.