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The Early Psychosis Screener (EPS): Item development and qualitative validation
B B Brodey1, J Addington2, M B First3
1TeleSage, Inc., 201 East Rosemary St., Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA.
Schizophrenia Research
|December 20, 2017
Summary
Researchers developed a new early psychosis screener by refining 490 items through expert review and cognitive interviews. The final 148-item screener aims for high sensitivity and specificity in identifying psychosis risk.
Area of Science:
- Psychiatry and Mental Health
- Clinical Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Early detection of psychosis is crucial for timely intervention and improved outcomes.
- Existing screening tools may lack the sensitivity or specificity required for early identification.
- The prodromal stage of psychosis presents unique challenges for assessment.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a highly sensitive and specific early psychosis screener.
- To refine a comprehensive item bank based on DSM-5 criteria and expert consensus.
- To create a tool for identifying individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis.
Main Methods:
- Assembled a comprehensive item bank from 20 established assessments.
- Converted core concepts into 490 Likert-scale, self-report items.
- Iteratively refined items through expert review and five rounds of cognitive interviewing with at-risk individuals and patients.
Main Results:
- Reduced the item bank from 490 to 301 items after expert review.
- Further refined the items through cognitive interviewing, revising 36, adding 52, and deleting 205 items.
- Achieved a final set of 148 items, all clearly understood by participants.
Conclusions:
- The iterative development process resulted in a clearly understood set of items for an early psychosis screener.
- Future work will utilize machine learning on the final 148 items to predict clinical high-risk status.
- The developed screener has the potential to significantly improve early detection of psychosis.
