Diagnostic agreement between the SCID-II screening questionnaire and the Personality Disorder Examination

Instruments to assess personality disorders offer reliability, but at the cost of large amounts of a skilled clinician's time to make assessments. The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III Axis II (SCID-II; Spitzer, Williams, Gibbon, & First, 1990), incorporates a self-report screening questionnaire, reducing the number of items needing evaluation by the interviewer. However, false negative responses may cause clinically important areas to be overlooked. To establish the rate of false negative responses, we compared participant self-report on the SCID-II with Axis II diagnostic assessment done by clinicians using the Personality Disorder Examination (Loranger, Susman, Oldham, & Russakoff, 1987). The false negative rate was low for every diagnosis, supporting validity of following up with clinician questioning only those diagnostic elements endorsed in the self-report. Avoidant and dependent personality disorders were accurately self-reported. This, an efficient assessment instrument for personality disorders might combine self-report of those disorders where self-report is reliable, with clinician assessment where needed.