Preliminary data on validity of the Drug Addiction Treatment Efficacy Questionnaire

This study describes the validation process for the Slovenian version of the Drug Addiction Treatment Efficacy Questionnaire (DATEQ).

DATEQ was constructed from the questionnaires used at the Centre for the Treatment of Drug Addiction, Ljubljana University Psychiatric Hospital, and within the network of Centres for the Prevention and Treatment of Drug Addiction in Slovenia during the past 14 years. The Slovenian version of the DATEQ was translated to English using the 'forward-backward' procedure by its authors and their co-workers. The validation process included 100 male and female patients with established addiction to illicit drugs who had been prescribed opioid substitution therapy. The DATEQ questionnaire was used in the study, together with clinical evaluation to measure psychological state and to evaluate the efficacy of treatment in the last year. To determinate the validity of DATEQ the correlation with the clinical assessments of the outcome was calculated using one-way ANOVA.

The F value was 44.4, p<0.001 (sum of squares: between groups 210.4, df=2, within groups 229.7, df=97, total 440.1, df=99). At the cut-off 4 the sensitivity is 81% and specificity 83%.

The validation process for the Slovenian DATEQ version shows metric properties similar to those found in international studies of similar questionnaires, suggesting that it measures the same constructs, in the same way and as similar questionnaires. However, the relatively low sensitivity and specificity suggests caution when using DATEQ as the only measure of outcome.