Development of a parent questionnaire for use in assessing adolescent drugabuse

The development and initial psychometric properties of a new parent questio nnaire for assessing adolescent drug abuse are described. The Personal Expe rience Inventory-Parent Version (PEI-PV) is intended to provide a standardi zed parent report as a companion measure to the adolescent sell-report inst rument, the Personal Experience Inventory. The PEI-PV addresses problems as sociated with the child's drug abuse and psychosocial factors and parenting practices that may underlie their drug involvement. Reliability and validi ty data are reported for two groups of mothers, 205 of whom had a child ref erred for an evaluation for drug treatment and 185 from a community sample. The structure and scope of the PEI-PV was supported by scale intercorrelat ion data; most scales had a proportion of unique, reliable variance greater than 20%. Estimates of the scale's internal consistency were found to be c omparable to those of established parent questionnaires, and the observed d ifferences between the clinic-referred and community samples were consisten t with expectations. Significant convergence of mothers' reports to those o f their child was obtained for nearly three-quarters of the PEI-PV scales, including moderate agreement between mother and child on the drug involveme nt severity scales. However, mothers tended to underreport their child's le vel of drug involvement and resulting problems compared to the child's self -report. The study results suggest that the PQ is associated with favorable evidence that the scales measure what they are intended to measure.