THE REFERRAL DECISION SCALE - A VALIDATION-STUDY

We examined the validity of the Referral Decision Scale (RDS), a test designed to screen for mental disorder in jail inmates, in a sample of 790 men admitted to an urban pretrial jail. Our results indicated tha t, in general, the RDS had excellent reliability and acceptable validi ty as a screening measure for serious mental disorder in jail settings , despite making a large number of false positive errors relative to b oth contemporaneous and subsequent assessments of mental disorder. Alt hough the RDS is well suited for use in research, more information is needed before the test is used for clinical purposes. We discuss some potential problems with the use of the RDS in correctional systems.