[Inter-clinician reliability of the Mexican version of Goldberg's "Standardized Psychiatric Interview"]

The Standardized Psychiatric Interview (SPI) was developed by Goldberg et al., for use in community surveys. The authors made the translation and adaptation of this instrument to Spanish and in this paper they present the inter-rater reliability study of different clinicians using the SPI in a sample of 30 women psychiatric out-patients. The raters were 4 psychiatrists and 2 clinical psychologists. A one week training course was developed before the study in order to get acquainted with the instrument, discuss it and use the standard technique to elicit and record psychiatric symptoms on 5 audiotapes and 10 subjects with different degrees of pathology. The inter-rater reliability was tested using the product-moment correlation, the statistic Kappa and a descriptive index of association in order to show the agreement between raters when the symptom was present or absent. A two-way analysis of variance was also carried out in order to test if there were any differences among the raters. The results show a mean product-moment correlation of 0.90 and a mean Kappa of 0.82. In 20 of the interviews a psychiatrist and a psychologist acted as raters and the results were almost the same. The authors conclude that the SPI is an useful technique for further studies in general practice and community surveys in the hands of mental health personnel trained in the use of Standardized Psychiatric Interview.