A new self-report scale for assessment of adolescent psychopathology: factor structure, reliability, validity, and diagnostic sensitivity.

Journal Article (Journal Article;Multicenter Study)

This paper describes four studies on self-reported problems in 2,243 adolescent males and females, 12 to 17 years of age. In Study 1, principal-axis factoring of 102 items covering 11 problem domains revealed six factors comprising 49.5% of the variance. Study 2 used confirmatory factor analysis of a 64-item reduced set on a new sample of 408 adolescents. Goodness-of-fit indicators suggested that the six-factor model had excellent fit to the data. Study 3 used data from the 2,157 adolescents used in the first two studies. Coefficient alphas ranged from .83 to .92. Median test-retest reliability for the six factors was .86. There was a consistent structure of the correlation matrix across age and gender. Study 4 was a study of criterion validity, using an additional sample of 86 children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sensitivity and specificity were high, with an overall diagnostic efficiency of 83%. This new self-report scale, the Conners/Wells Adolescent Self-Report of Symptoms (CASS), may provide a useful component of a multimodal assessment of adolescent psychopathology.

Full Text

Duke Authors

Cited Authors

  • Conners, CK; Wells, KC; Parker, JD; Sitarenios, G; Diamond, JM; Powell, JW

Published Date

  • December 1997

Published In

Volume / Issue

  • 25 / 6

Start / End Page

  • 487 - 497

PubMed ID

  • 9468109

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0091-0627

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1023/a:1022637815797

Language

  • eng

Conference Location

  • United States