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Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate

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CLINICAL ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENTS IN PSYCHIATRY 209<br />

one or the other of the official classifications of mental disorders. The<br />

usefulness of such instruments is closely linked to their reliability <strong>and</strong><br />

validity.<br />

Inter-rater Reliability<br />

The reliability of clinical assessment instruments is usually studied using<br />

one of the two following methods: an observer scores the interview while<br />

the interviewer also scores it <strong>and</strong> the results are compared to determine the<br />

degree to which the two raters agree inter-rater reliability), or the interview<br />

is repeated at a later time, by the same or by a different interviewer test±<br />

retest reliability). Good to excellent inter-rater <strong>and</strong> test±retest reliability have<br />

been reported for most interviews described in this chapter.<br />

Validity<br />

The best way to establish the validity of a clinical diagnostic instrument<br />

would be to measure its validity against an external ``gold st<strong>and</strong>ard'' [101].<br />

In the absence, up to now, of any such st<strong>and</strong>ard for any of the disorders that<br />

are assessed in psychiatry, psychiatric diagnoses achieved using clinical<br />

assessment instruments have been compared to diagnoses derived from:<br />

i) clinician's free-form assessment; ii) other clinical assessment instruments;<br />

iii) the Longitudinal, Expert, All Data LEAD) procedure; or iv) the consensus<br />

best-estimate diagnostic procedure.<br />

Comparison with Clinician's Free-form Assessment<br />

Agreement between diagnoses obtained with structured or semi-structured<br />

interviews <strong>and</strong> clinician's free-form assessment or diagnoses in medical<br />

records has generally been found to be low [102]. Such comparisons are,<br />

however, unsatisfactory for evaluating the validity of assessment instruments,<br />

since clinicians' diagnoses are unreliable themselves, as shown<br />

by lack of agreement between two clinicians assessing the same patient<br />

[103, 104].<br />

Comparison between Assessment Instruments<br />

Evaluating the validity of one instrument by comparing it to another<br />

instrument requires that the validity of the second instrument has been

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