THE LONGITUDINAL STABILITY OF THE ADDICTION SEVERITY INDEX

The Addiction Severity Index (ASI) is a structured interview widely us ed by substance abuse clinicians and researchers for client screening, determining treatment needs, and assessing treatment outcomes. Previo us researchers have evaluated inter-rater agreement, test-retest relia bility, and concurrent validity. The present report describes the stab ility of ASI scores in longitudinal work. In the context of an ongoing treatment outcome evaluation study involving seven assessors, inter-r ater agreement, inter-rater reliability, as well as intra- and inter-r ater accuracy were assessed repeatedly during a 2-year period. The res ults show the scores derived from the ASI to be stable across assessor s and over time. The relationship between stable scores and resources required for training are discussed