Evaluation of the Reliability and Validity of Two Clinician- Judgment Suicide Risk Assessment Instruments
Abstract
Background: This study evaluates the psychometric properties and factor structure of two clinician-judgment suicide risk assessment instruments – the Suicide Assessment Checklist developed by Yufit and the other developed by Rogers. Methods: As an archival study, 85 client records were obtained through a university psychology clinic. Results: Internal consistency was high for only one subscale of the Yufit checklist after deleting items for factor analyses, whereas internal consistency was high for the overall Rogers checklist after deleting items. Interrater reliability was excellent for both instruments. Both checklists correlated with self-reported suicidality on the Personality Assessment Inventory. Preliminary analyses indicated that data from the Yufit checklist are unsuitable for factor analysis, whereas factor analysis of the Rogers checklist identified one depressive factor. Conclusions: These findings provided evidence supporting the reliability and validity of the Rogers checklist. The findings also provided a good starting point for future research of the Yufit checklist.
References
1970). Depression: Causes and treatment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
(2006). Advances in the assessment of suicide risk. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62, 185–200.
(1994). Guidelines, criteria, and rules of thumb for evaluating normed and standardized assessment instruments in psychology. Psychological Assessment, 6, 284–290.
(1951). Coefficient α and the internal structure of tests. Psychometrika, 16, 297–315.
(2006). Psychological testing in suicide risk assessment. In , Textbook of suicide assessment and management (pp. 177–196). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.
(2006). Principles of exploratory factor analysis. In , Differentiating normal and abnormal personality: Second edition (pp. 209–237). New York: Springer.
(1991). The prediction of suicide. Archives of General Psychiatry, 48, 418–422.
(1991). Personality Assessment Inventory – professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.
(2002). The use of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) to assess offenders. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 46, 333–349.
(2001). Epidemiology of completed and attempted suicide: Toward a framework for prevention. Clinical Neuroscience Research, 1, 310–323.
(2000). SPSS and SAS programs for determining the number of components using parallel analysis and Velicer’s MAP test. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 32, 396–402.
(1990). Development of a model for crisis line suicide risk assessment: The Crisis Line Suicide Risk Scale. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Akron, Akron, OH.
(1989). Crisis line suicide risk scale. In , Suicide ’89: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the American Association of Suicidology (pp. 167–169). Denver, CO: American Association of Suicidology.
(1994). Development and psychometric analysis of the Suicide Assessment Checklist. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 16, 352–368.
(2004). Clinical use of suicide assessment scales: Enhancing reliability and validity through the therapeutic relationship. In , Assessment, treatment, and prevention of suicidal behavior (pp. 7–27). New Jersey: Wiley.
(2002). Validity of the Suicide Assessment Checklist in an emergency crisis center. Journal of Counseling and Development, 80, 493–502.
(2003). Being inconsistent about consistency: When coefficient α does and doesn’t matter. Journal of Personality Assessment, 80, 217–222.
(2004). Empirically informed approaches to topics in suicide risk assessment. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 22, 651–665.
(2003). Suicide Assessment Checklist. Unpublished manuscript.
(