NCJ Number
216698
Journal
Journal of Child & Adolescent Substance Abuse Volume: 16 Issue: 1 Dated: 2006 Pages: 39-52
Date Published
2006
Length
14 pages
Annotation
This article describes the development and psychometric properties of a brief screening tool, the Personal Experience Screening Questionnaire (PESQ), for use with American Indian youth suspected of having substance abuse problems.
Abstract
The results generally supported the use of the revised PESQ Indian Health Service-Personal Experience Screening Questionnaire (IHS-PESQ) for use in screening American Indian youth for substance abuse problems. The findings indicated favorable internal consistency across gender and age groups. The convergent validity findings revealed a significant association between the problem severity scale and the psychosocial scale, suggesting a strong connection between adolescent drug use and psychosocial risk factors. Other findings indicated that response distortion elevations were consistently low across the subgroups, as were the number of invalid cases due to unscorable responses. The psychometric data obtained on the revised PESQ for American Indian youth were comparable to the psychometric data obtained from the primarily White sample. Data were gathered from 646 male participants who were enrolled in a drug prevention program serving American Indian adolescents suspected of drug involvement. The sample was divided into 2 groups: (1) a development sample (n=398), used to identify the new screening items, and (2) a replication sample, used to evaluate the reliability and validity of the new screening items. The analysis focused on comparisons between participants and nonparticipants in the development sample and between participants in the development and replication samples. Principle component factor analyses were conducted on the 18 screening items. Two revisions to the PESQ were made to better accommodate its use with American Indian youth. The revised PESQ was empirically tested using an existing dataset that was previously used to validate the original PESQ. This dataset consisted of high school students referred to school chemical health counselors for an in-school drug use incident. Next, 985 students in grades 6 through 12 at several tribal-based schools were administered the revised PESQ (IHS-PESQ) and the results were compared to the original PESQ validation results. Follow-up studies should test the IHS-PESQ in other American Indian youth samples. Figure, tables, references