MEASUREMENT OF CHILD PSYCHOPATHOLOGY--A WAY FORWARD

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The award will enable a number of pilot projects to be developed that will provide vital research experience, have considerable scientific merit in their own right, and will serve as a basis for the programmatic development of this work. The specific research goals, addressed within the Research Plan, can be summarized as follows: (a) The initial goal is to study the use of computers in psychiatric assessment. This will be achieved by two related studies of direct computer interviewing of adolescents. The first of these studies will assess if, as has been suggested, subjects report more frequently and in greater detail, episodes of suicidal ideation and behavior to a computer than to a person. The second will examine if adolescents can complete a complex structured interview, such as the DISC, without the need for a human interviewer. (b) The second goal is to produce a more accurate and valid general screening questionnaire (the ASQ) for psychiatric disorder in adolescents. This would employ weighted scoring of symptoms having high predictive value and would also integrate an assessment of social impairment. (c) The final component of the research plan is to examine the test-retest paradigm systematically, in particular the phenomenon of attenuation, and discover in a prospective experimental fashion just what can be done to improve the reliability of psychiatric measures.