The Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children-Revised Version (DISC-R): I. Preparation, field testing, interrater reliability, and acceptability.
OBJECTIVE
To describe the history and assessment strategies used to investigate and revise the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC), a highly structured interview form used by lay interviewers to elicit diagnostic criteria for the common psychiatric disorders of childhood and adolescence.


METHODS
Revision was based on clinical and community data that identified unreliable and undiscriminating items in an earlier version of the instrument (DISC-1). A field study was carried out with 74 parent-child pairs. Interrater reliability and acceptability to patients was high. Accompanying papers describe the test-retest and construct validity of the instrument.


CONCLUSIONS
Taken together, the findings suggest that the DISC is an acceptable, brief, inexpensive, and convenient instrument for ascertaining a comprehensive range of child and adolescent diagnoses whose methodological properties are comparable with other child diagnostic instruments.
Shaffer
D
D
Division of Child Psychiatry, New York State Psychiatric Institute, NY 10032.
Schwab-Stone
M
M
Fisher
P
P
Cohen
P
P
Piacentini
J
J
Davies
M
M
Conners
C K
CK
Regier
D
D
D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000145:classification / Q000175:diagnosis*; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales / Q000592:standards* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results