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The SASSI-3 face valid other drugs scale: a psychometric investigation.

Article Excerpt
The authors investigated the psychometric capabilities of the Face Valid Other Drugs (FVOD) scale of the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory-3 (SASSI-3; G. A. Miller, 1999). Internal consistency reliability estimates and construct validity factor analysis for 230 college students provided initial support for the psychometric properties of the SASSI-3's FVOD scale.

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In a relatively brief time, the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory-3 (SASSI-3; Lazowski, Miller, Boye, & Miller, 1998) has become one of the instruments used most frequently in college settings to screen for drug and alcohol use (Myerholtz & Rosenberg, 1998). This instrument's popularity among college counselors and its reported usefulness in screening for alcohol and other drug abuse and dependence issues (e.g., Brems, Johnson, & Namyniuk, 2002; Gray, 2001; Juhnke, Vacc, Curtis, Coll, & Paredes, 2003; Schmidt, 2001) is intriguing considering that very few college students were included in the SASSI-3's developmental and cross-validation samples. The SASSI-3 manual (Miller, 1999) reported that only 3% of the developmental and 3% of the cross-validation samples were composed of persons in a "students/homemakers" category. This percentage translates into a maximum of 25 college students. Additionally, a lack of discrimination between these two categories of participants makes it difficult for clinicians and researchers to accurately determine whether college students as a population were adequately represented during the SASSI-3's construction process.

Compounding the lack of clarity is a paucity of empirical research investigating the SASSI-3's psychometric characteristics in college student populations. To date, only one empirical study of the SASSI-3 using college participants is available in the literature. Clements (2002) computed coefficient alphas for each of SASSI-3's scales and produced a range of alphas from .03 to .92 (median [alpha] = .56). Also, Clements assessed this instrument's alcohol dependence diagnostic accuracy by comparing the SASSI's classification with clinical diagnoses obtained from the Composite International Diagnostic Interview-Substance Abuse Module (Robins, Cottler, & Babor, 1995). Clements concluded that the SASSI-3 performed unsatisfactorily. The dearth of research on the SASSI-3 in this population coupled with the SASSI-3's popularity among clinicians is particularly troublesome in light of the American Counseling Association's (ACA) Code of Ethics regarding test selection (ACA, 1995, Section E.6.). Specifically, the Code requires all counselors to carefully consider the psychometric capabilities of an assessment instrument prior to its use with each new population. An instrument that was validated on one population may not accurately assess the same construct in another population that was not included or was underrepresented in the original standardization sample. The danger in using an instrument with a population that was not included or was underrepresented in the standardization sample is that the instrument's results may provide clinicians with misleading data that result in inaccurate diagnoses and treatment recommendations.

In an era when college student drug use (Boyd, McCabe, & d'Arcy, 2003; Bureau of Justice, Statistics, n.d.; O'Malley & Johnston, 2002; Strote, Lee, & Wechsler, 2002; Wakers, Foy, & Castro, 2002) and the consequences thereof are mounting (e.g., McMillan & Conner, 2002; Miley, 2001; Pope, Ionescu-Pioggia, & Pope, 2001; 2000 Statistics on Alcohol and Other Drug Use on American Campuses, n.d.), an empirical...

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