An application of item response theory analysis to alcohol, cannabis, and cocaine criteria in DSM-IV.
Item response theory (IRT) is supplanting classical test theory as the basis for measures development. This study demonstrated the utility of IRT for evaluating DSM-IV diagnostic criteria. Data on alcohol, cannabis, and cocaine symptoms from 372 adult clinical participants interviewed with the Composite International Diagnostic Interview--Expanded Substance Abuse Module (CIDI-SAM) were analyzed with Mplus (B. Muthen & L. Muthen, 1998) and MULTILOG (D. Thissen, 1991) software. Tolerance and legal problems criteria were dropped because of poor fit with a unidimensional model. Item response curves, test information curves, and testing of variously constrained models suggested that DSM-IV criteria in the CIDI-SAM discriminate between only impaired and less impaired cases and may not be useful to scale case severity. IRT can be used to study the construct validity of DSM-IV diagnoses and to identify diagnostic criteria with poor performance.
Center of Alcohol Studies, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8001, USA. lngnbchr@rci.rutgers.edu
James W
JW
Langenbucher
Erich
E
Labouvie
Christopher S
CS
Martin
Pilar M
PM
Sanjuan
Lawrence
L
Bavly
Levent
L
Kirisci
Tammy
T
Chung
D000328:Adult; D000437:Alcoholism / Q000175:diagnosis*; D019970:Cocaine-Related Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D039721:Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D002189:Marijuana Abuse / Q000175:diagnosis*; D011582:Psychological Theory; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012720:Severity of Illness Index