DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF AN ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS TOOL

We describe the development and validation of a 25-item Adult Children of Alcoholics Tool (ACAT) in three separate studies: (a) The ACAT was administered to a normative student sample and a clinical outpatient sample to develop a scale with satisfactory reliability and criterion validity; (b) these findings were replicated with a sample of social w ork students and another clinical sample, providing further construct validation with other measures of current mental health functioning (e .g, depression, internalized shame), and family of origin characterist ics; (c) using a third student sample, the ACAT was found to be signif icantly correlated with the Adult Children of Alcoholics Index, sugges ting measurement of a similar but not identical construct. We discuss the implications of using the ACAT in social work practice as a measur e of internalized negative attributes associated with familial alcohol ism particularly the need to determine the cross-cultural generalizabi lity of the ''adult children of alcoholics'' syndrome.