Reliability and validity of the longitudinal interval follow-up evaluation for assessing outcome of anxiety disorders

The LIFE-UP, an instrument for prospectively following course for psychiatric disorders, has been extended to include Psychiatric Status Ratings (PSRs) for the DSM-III-R anxiety disorders panic (with and without agoraphobia), agoraphobia without panic, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, and simple phobia. This paper reports data on the reliability and validity of the LIFE-UP as used in the Harvard/Brown Anxiety Disorders Research Program. We found generally good reliability for the PSRs, both inter-rater and long-term test-retest. The reliability coefficients for the rater-administered instruments were very similar to those for the self-reports, suggesting that a large proportion of the variance was due to subject variability rather than rater variability. Reliability for the beginning of the year of follow-up was very similar to that for the time just before the interview. In addition, correlations with other measures of psychosocial function or anxiety symptomatology provided evidence for the external validity of the PSRs as measures of psychiatric morbidity.