A. Janca et al., THE WORLD-HEALTH-ORGANIZATION SOMATOFORM DISORDERS SCHEDULE - A PRELIMINARY-REPORT ON DESIGN AND RELIABILITY, European psychiatry, 10(8), 1995, pp. 373-378
The World Health Organization (WHO) Somatoform Disorders Schedule (SDS
) is a highly standardized instrument for the assessment of somatoform
disorders according to the tenth revision of the International Classi
fication of Diseases (ICD-10) and the fourth edition of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV). The SDS was produced in the framewor
k of the WHO International Study of Somatoform Disorders and tested fo
r its reliability in Brazil, India, Italy, the USA and Zimbabwe. A sam
ple of 180 patients from general psychiatry, primary care and general
medical settings were interviewed with the SDS within a three-day inte
rval by non-clinician and clinician interviewers. The agreement betwee
n the two interviews was tested using the intraclass correlation coeff
icients (ICC) and kappa statistic. The test-retest reliability of the
SDS was found to be very good (the ICC for all the centres was 0.76; o
verall kappa value for SDS questions was 0.58; one-third of SDS questi
ons had a kappa value of 0.60 or higher). The field test results of th
e SDS indicated that the instrument may be administered in larger stud
ies by non-clinician interviewers without compromising the ability to
document the prevalence of somatoform disorders in different cultures.