An Application of Item Response Theory Analysis... : Journal of Abnormal Psychology (original) (raw)

An Application of Item Response Theory Analysis to Alcohol, Cannabis, and Cocaine Criteria in DSM-IV

• James W. Langenbucher
• Erich Labouvie
• Christopher S. Martin
• Pilar M. Sanjuan
• Lawrence Bavly
• Levent Kirisci
• Tammy Chung

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

113

(

1

)

:p

72

-

80

,

February 2004

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| DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.113.1.72

Item response theory (IRT) is supplanting classical test theory as the basis for measures development. This study demonstrated the utility of IRT for evaluating DSM-IV diagnostic criteria. Data on alcohol, cannabis, and cocaine symptoms from 372 adult clinical participants interviewed with the Composite International Diagnostic Interview—Expanded Substance Abuse Module (CIDI-SAM) were analyzed with Mplus () and MULTILOG () software. Tolerance and legal problems criteria were dropped because of poor fit with a unidimensional model. Item response curves, test information curves, and testing of variously constrained models suggested that DSM-IV criteria in the CIDI-SAM discriminate between only impaired and less impaired cases and may not be useful to scale case severity. IRT can be used to study the construct validity of DSM-IV diagnoses and to identify diagnostic criteria with poor performance.