Methodological Issues in Assessing Psychiatric Disorders With Self-Reports

This chapter discusses methodological issues involved in obtaining accurate self-reports about psychiatric disorders from respondents in general population surveys using methods that do not require clinician administration or clinician judgment. Such data are subject to greater error than clinician-administered research diagnostic interviews but are nonetheless favored over the latter in large community surveys because of the considerable expense and substantial logistic complications associated with using clinicians as survey interviewers. Indeed, our understanding of the distribution and correlates of psychiatric disorders in the general population is based largely on the results of surveys in which trained lay interviewers rather than clinicians have administered fully structured interviews (e.g., Kessler et al., 1994; Robins & Regier, 1991).