ABSTRACT
The introduction to DSM-III clearly conveyed the good news that, as promised, the reliability problem was substantially diminished. The result, he stated, was that the reliability problem had been "solved". Although the issue of achieving high reliability at the expense of validity is an important one, the noteworthy achievement in selling DSM-III was that by 1982 neither the reliability problem-solvers nor their critics were publicly agonizing anymore about unreliability. If data for specific diagnoses had been presented, the few cases per cell might have highlighted the shakiness of drawing any general conclusions about reliability. Hanada and Takahashi translated DSM-III into Japanese and conducted a reliability study of 345 adult patients in seven psychiatric facilities in Japan. They concluded that there are serious problems with the reliability of the specific diagnoses in DSM-III.
