Adolescents Semistructured Interview (ASI): Characteristics and inter-rater, and test-retest reliability study.

The use of interviews for the assessment and diagnosis of child and adolesc ent psychiatry is a basic need for any further investigation in this popula tion. We designed a semistructured clinical interview based in other instru ments such as the K-SADS, ISC, DISC and SCAN. The Adolescents Semistructure d Interview (ASI) was designed with the DSM-IV criteria and explores intern al and external disorders as well as others such as schizophrenia and alcoh ol and drug abuse in adolescents. The goats of the study are the to establi shment of the interrater and test-retest (one week) reliability of the ASI. Adolescents were evaluated during their second contact with the institutio n, conjointly with their mother or father, after the informant consent was obtained. The evaluation was made in 60-90 minutes. Two clinicians were pre sent at the interview, one made the questions and assessed; the other only assessed. Both of them were blind to each other's diagnosis. The test-retes t were made by differents clinicians. The sample was integrated with 81 out patients. The kappa values for the interrater study were the following: maj or depressive disorder (MDD) 0.92, dysthymic disorder (DD) 0.81, attention deficit disorder (ADD) 0.75, conduct disorder (CD) 0.97 and alcohol and dru g abuse (ADA) 0.90. The kappa values for the test-retest study were the fol lowing: MDD 0.59, DD 0.40, ADD 0.78, CD 0.85 and ADA 0.65. This is the firs t worldwide study in Spanish with a semistructured clinical interview for a dolescents.