Differences in the Symptom Check List-90 profiles of black and white methadone patients

The Sympton Check List-90 (SCL-90) scores of 900 methadone patients were compared by sex and race using a two-way multivariate analysis of variance. The mean profiles did not differ with respect to sex, but did for race. White methadone patients were more obsessive-compulsive and depressed than the Black patients. However, the magnitudes of the mean differences were less than 2.5, and such small mean differences indicate that the employment of separate sex- or race-based normative values for the interpretation of the SCL-90 is unnecessary with methadone patients.