Convergent validity of self-administered addiction severity index in a sample of Nigerian patients in a residential treatment facility

Abstract

Background: Substance use disorders present with multiple drug-related problems that need to be evaluated with a view to planning and administering holistic interventions that could potentially improve addiction treatment outcomes. Many valid instruments are available for assessing the problems that occur in addiction but most of them require some training and they take a lot of time to administer. This study validates a shorter self-administered version of the Addiction severity Index (ASI) against the Clinician-administered ASI with a view to cutting the time needed to administer the instrument. Methods: The study recruited 142 patients in a residential treatment center. Correlation coefficient and t -test were used to assess for the convergence of the two version. Results: The correlation coefficients ranged from 0.52 to 0.97 for the different domain of the ASI with higher endorsement of problems in the self-administered than clinician administered version in most domains. Conclusion: The self-administered ASI is a valid alternative to the clinician-administered ASI and it saves valuable time especially in resource-constrained settings.

Development and Psychometric Properties of the Synthetic Drug Dependence Scale in a Chinese Sample

“…Besides, the four subscales measure various important aspects of dependence that can provide a more comprehensive assessment of synthetic drug dependence compared with a unidimensional scale, such as the Severity Dependence Scale (Gossop et al, 1995 ). Thirdly, compared with interview instruments, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the Addiction Severity Index, the OASI only has 12 items and is thus more convenient to perform population-based assessments with a lower time cost (Baggio et al, 2020 ; Yerima et al, 2020 ), which is conducive to establish prevalence rates at the population level. Furthermore, as a Chinese localized scale, the content of the scale better fits with the Chinese social and cultural background (Lian and Liu, 2003 , 2004 ) and containing natural and intelligible item wording without distorting part of the information during translation (Upsing and Rittberger, 2018 ), thus the scale will be more suitable for Chinese drug abusers and will produce more authentic information compared with directly applying western models (West et al, 2019 ).…”