Good news for allegedly bad studies. Assessment of psychometric properties may help to elucidate deception in online studies on OCD

Abstract

Online surveys are gaining increasing momentum in clinical research. Ease of recruitment and low cost are two of the biggest advantages of Internet studies. There are, however, concerns about their reliability and validity.The present study compared the psychometric properties of self-report instruments measuring obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) across three samples: (1) participants with a confirmed diagnosis of OCD (n=66), (2) participants with a probable diagnosis of OCD (n=86) and (3) clinical experts on OCD and students who were asked to pretend to have OCD (n=121). Psychometric indices of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Score (Y-BOCS) and the Obsessive Compulsive Inventory (OCI-R) served as indicators for reliability and validity.Both patient samples revealed good retest reliability scores and good correlations between Y-BOCS and OCI-R scores. In contrast, the expert group showed poor retest reliabilities and mixed results for the intercorrelations between OCI-R and Y-BOCS scores. Simulators display a marked tendency to over-report symptoms on the OCI-R.Good psychometric properties of online studies may serve as a proxy for the validity of diagnoses.