A new psychiatric report and rating scale assessing severity and frequency of aggressive behaviour is presented and evaluated. It is based on the staff's standardized reports of aggressive incidents. By using a special aggression report form, comprehensive and standardized information is obtained, thereby permitting scoring and further analysis of different aspects of aggressive incidents. The reliability of scoring is tested and found to be good as is the scale's capacity to discriminate between different patterns of aggressive behaviour in different groups of patients. As a result of this and because of the simplicity of the scale, it is thought to be a potentially useful tool in scientific research on aggressive behaviour from psychiatric inpatients.

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Scales for measuring aggressive cognitions and behaviour have mainly been administered by nursing-staff or been self-ratings. During recent years we have made an attempt to construct an observer-scale for aggression analogous to the Hamilton scale for depression. The Social Dysfunction and Aggression Scale (SDAS) consists of 9 items (SDAS-9) covering outward aggression and 2 items (SDAS-2) covering inward aggression. The inter-observer reliability of the SDAS has been found adequate in terms of intra-class coefficients. In a pilot study on 82 inpatients from different centres in Denmark and Sweden the SDAS was compared to three-item scales for outward and inward aggression and to a global scale for outward aggression. The results showed that the SDAS-9 correlated positively with the other outward observer-scales, and the SDAS-2 with the other inward scale. A divergent validity was seen between the outward and inward scales, indicating that it is necessary to measure both dimensions. Preliminary ranks-according-to-frequency scores showed the following order of the nine outward items: irritability, dysphoric mood, social disturbances, nondirected verbal aggressiveness, negativism, directed verbal aggressiveness, physical violence towards staff, physical violence towards things, and physical violence towards persons other than staff.