Psychometric properties


Reliability and validity
Test-retest reliability yielded Intra-Class Correlation Coefficients (ICCs) ranging from 0.81 to 0.89 (N = 128) according to the scale under scrutiny. Cronbach alpha coefficients ranged between 0.59 and 0.83.

Test-retest reliability results from another study on a larger sample (Bergeron et al., Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, accepted) are within the same range. This study also establishes criterion validity through correspondences between Dominic-based diagnoses and clinical judgment. Significant differences between clinical and non-clinical samples were also demonstrated. Detailed results cannot be reported here as long as the article has not been published.

The first version of the Dominic Adolescent included questions about symptom frequency and duration with the aim of yielding full DSM diagnoses. Those questions, however, greatly reduced psychometric properties and were taken out.

Limits
The Dominic Adolescent exhibits the same limitations as other instruments addressing adolescent mental health:

• Assessing adolescent mental health requires input from several informants (parents, teacher, peer, etc.).
• Social desirability may be a limiting factor.
• Lack of insight may also be a limitation.
• Instruments used to screen for mental health sacrifice idiosyncratic information in exchange for speedy assessment and data comparability.

The Dominic Adolescent also presents a limitation of its own:

• It provides diagnostic-approximates or “tendencies” rather than straightforward DSM-IV-TR diagnoses.