The Psychiatric Diagnostic Screening Questionnaire: Development, reliability and validity

The Psychiatric Diagnostic Screening Questionnaire (PDSQ) is a self-report scale designed to screen for the most common DSM-IV axis I disorders encoun tered in outpatient mental health settings. We report the results of four s tudies of the PDSQ involving more than 2,500 subjects receiving outpatient mental health care. In two studies we examined the understandability of the items on the PDSQ. Items that initially were less well understood were rew ritten, and all items of the final version of the scale were understood by more than 90% of the respondents. In the other two studies, the reliability and validity of the PDSQ subscales was examined. A priori criteria were es tablished to guide the revision of subscales. The final version of the ques tionnaire contains 13 subscales (major depressive disorder [MDD], bulimia, post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD], panic disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder [GAD], obsessive-compulsive disorder [ OCD], alcohol abuse/dependence, drug abuse/dependence, somarization, hypoch ondriasis, and psychosis), each of which achieved good to excellent levels of internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and discriminant, converg ent, and concurrent validity. Copyright (C) 2001 by W.B. Saunders Company.