Validation of a Turkish Version of the ICD-10 Symptom Rating (ISR)

Jan Ilhan Kizilhan,Antje Roniger,Karin Tritt,Friedrich Von Heymann

doi:10.5964/ejop.v9i2.580

Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, Antje Roniger + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v9i2.580

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Abstract

Numerous psychiatric and psychosomatic clinics in Turkey and Germany use the Symptom Checklist 90 Revised (SCL-90-R) developed by Derogatis (1977) or the validated Turkish version by Dag (1991) for assessing psychological symptoms. Many patients informed us during numerous studies and visits to these clinics that this test with its 90 questions took too long and that they were unable to sufficiently concentrate on it. In the meantime, the much more economical ICD-10 Symptom Rating (ISR) (Tritt et al., 2008) self-rating questionnaire, comprising 29 questions, has been developed in Germany in 2008. In 2008 and 2009 we therefore decided to translate the ISR into Turkish, to analyse it for its reliability and validity and compare it with the SCL-90-R and the BDI. In an analysis of 277 Turkish subjects – 127 of whom were inpatients, 36 outpatients and 104 clinically unremarkable healthy participants – very good psychometric characteristics were achieved in terms of high internal consistency of individual, additional and overall scales. The results of the factor analysis conducted showed that the ISR Measure has satisfactory construct validity. In a random sample of inpatients, the Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from 0.66 (scale: Compulsive syndrome) to 0.93 (overall scale). The advantage of this instrument over BDI and SCL-90-R lies in its shorter processing time. The German version of the ISR promises lesser use of time and good empirical quality, which we double-checked with a translated Turkish version tested on persons of Turkish origin in Germany.

Highlights

Psychometric symptom capture is a widely used method in psychotherapeutic practice (Freyberger & Stieglitz, 2005), quality assurance (Grawe & Braun, 1994; Heymann, Zaudig, & Tritt, 2003) and research (Hill & Lambert, 2000)
Regular methods of diagnosing psychiatric disorders using psychometric tests for each individual patient can be too time-consuming and impracticable (Wittchen & Perkonigg, 1997). For this reason, when developing psychometric tests, efforts are made to bear in mind validity and reliability issues, and their application in terms of time and practical implementation
Apart from nine individual scales and a Global Symptom Index (GSI), the SCL-90-R provides a characteristic value for the severity of psychological impairment, which takes psychological comorbidity into account

Summary

Introduction

Psychometric symptom capture is a widely used method in psychotherapeutic practice (Freyberger & Stieglitz, 2005), quality assurance (Grawe & Braun, 1994; Heymann, Zaudig, & Tritt, 2003) and research (Hill & Lambert, 2000). It enables those symptoms of a disorder that are important for the entire treatment process to be determined from the initial visit, and it assists the process of arriving at a diagnosis and assessing the therapy. It has been reported that the test’s 90 questions are too much to handle, especially for patients with moderate to severe depression and that they feel that the application of the test is stressful (Kizilhan, 2010)

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