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Routine evaluation of mental health: reliable information or worthless‘guesstimates’?
Author(s) -
Loevdahl H.,
Friis S.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
acta psychiatrica scandinavica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.849
H-Index - 146
eISSN - 1600-0447
pISSN - 0001-690X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0447.1996.tb09813.x
Subject(s) - inter rater reliability , mental health , reliability (semiconductor) , scale (ratio) , psychology , mental health care , clinical psychology , psychiatry , applied psychology , medicine , rating scale , developmental psychology , geography , power (physics) , physics , quantum mechanics , cartography
Routine evaluation of mental health care systems necessitates a quick assessment of progress and outcome. This study was designed to determine the value of the GAF‐scale in such applications. We allowed 104 raters from six therapeutic centres to rate five clinical case‐vignettes. Interrater reliability was almost equal for raters within different professional categories. The highest and the lowest scores for each of the case‐vignettes differed by between 39 and 45 points. The raters’ biases ranged from −23 to +30 points, and random deviations were between 1 and 20 points. Systematic differences between centres were up to 6 points. Our main finding is that the reliability of GAF scores in routine settings proved unsatisfactory with untrained raters.