[A short questionnaire for problem drinkers. An empirical analysis (author's transl)]

This short questionnaire for alcoholics (KFA) has so far been used as an aid for the clinical diagnosis of alcoholism. In the presented empirical study the KFA was tested on its efficiency as an independent diagnostic instrument for the identification of alcoholics. The questionnaire was given to 120 male alcoholics and 80 male controls (nonalcoholic inpatients). Its validity (correlation of test scores by independent criterion) of r = 0.81 with a reliability of r = 0.94 is fairly high, considering the nature of our control group being inpatients in contrast to the normally used healthy controls. A further improvement of discrimination could be achieved in weighting certain items. On this basis given a cutting score of 6 points the misclassifications in both alcoholics and controls could be reduced to 4%. Allowing this error rate the KFA can be considered a suitable test for the identification of alcoholics.