The Cleveland Adaptive Psychopathology Inventory: preliminary validity and reliability of a multi-scale personality and psychopathology questionnaire

OBJECTIVE: The present study describes the development of the Cleveland Adaptive Psychopathology Inventory (CAPI), a brief multi-scale personality and psychopathology questionnaire for the screening of common mental health disorders.

METHODS: The 118-item questionnaire consists of 10 clinical scales, a brief scale for the screening of substance abuse, and three scales for the assessment of response bias. A sample of 4000 volunteers with and without self-reported medical or mental health conditions was used to assess the psychometric properties of the open source measure including internal consistency, test–retest reliability, and preliminary validity analyses with diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of self-reported psychiatric diagnosis.

RESULTS: Internal consistency of the subscales for the normative sample ranged from .568 to .872, with mean inter-item correlations ranging from .161 to .410. The average test-retest across all of the samples ranged from .706 to .872. Finally, sensitivity and specificity (area under the curve) for the subscales with the dependent variables being self-reported diagnosis ranged from .666 to .899.

CONCLUSIONS: The preliminary results suggest that the CAPI is a useful tool for clinicians and researchers interested in screening for comorbid psychopathology in both general and clinical populations.