Adolescents Semistructured Interview (ASI):: Characteristics and inter-rater, and test-retest reliability study.

The use of interviews for the assessment and diagnosis of child and adolescent psychiatry is a basic need for any further investigation in this population. We designed a semistructured clinical interview based in other instruments such as the K-SADS, ISC, DISC and SCAN. The Adolescents Semistructured Interview (ASI) was designed with the DSM-IV criteria and explores internal and external disorders as well as others such as schizophrenia and alcohol and drug abuse in adolescents. The goats of the study are the to establishment of the interrater and test-retest (one week) reliability of the ASI. Adolescents were evaluated during their second contact with the institution, conjointly with their mother or father, after the informant consent was obtained. The evaluation was made in 60-90 minutes. Two clinicians were present at the interview, one made the questions and assessed; the other only assessed. Both of them were blind to each other's diagnosis. The test-retest were made by differents clinicians. The sample was integrated with 81 outpatients. The kappa values for the interrater study were the following: major depressive disorder (MDD) 0.92, dysthymic disorder (DD) 0.81, attention deficit disorder (ADD) 0.75, conduct disorder (CD) 0.97 and alcohol and drug abuse (ADA) 0.90. The kappa values for the test-retest study were the following: MDD 0.59, DD 0.40, ADD 0.78, CD 0.85 and ADA 0.65. This is the first worldwide study in Spanish with a semistructured clinical interview for adolescents.