TY  - JOUR
T1  - BLindness and reliability in lifetime psychiatric diagnosis
AU  - Mazure C, Gershon ES
Y1  - 1979/05/01
N1  - 10.1001/archpsyc.1979.01780050031002
JO  - Archives of General Psychiatry
SP  - 521
EP  - 525
VL  - 36
IS  - 5
N2  - • Confidence in the assignment of lifetime psychiatric diagnosis is of great importance to genetic studies of psychiatric illness. To establish the credibility of a lifetime psychiatric history obtained via a structured interview, two paradigms were constructed to estimate reproducibility of the interview recording process. The first paradigm, simultaneous coding, was used to test comparability of four interviewers independently coding an interview form. Low variance/high reliability was demonstrated. The second paradigm, test-retest, provided for each subject to be interviewed twice, with a mean interim time of 6.7 months (SEM =.39). This paradigm demonstrated high reproducibility of psychiatric diagnosis over time. The overall K value for measurement of diagnostic agreement was. 79. Only the diagnostic category of minor depression seemed to evade reliability. It was shown across both paradigms that an interviewer need not be blind (naive to previously held diagnosis) to obtain an unbiased interview. However, it is still recommended that the diagnosis of each interview should be determined by an independent diagnostician.
SN  - 0003-990X
M3  - doi: 10.1001/archpsyc.1979.01780050031002
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1979.01780050031002
ER  -