Reliability and validity of drug use items differing in the nature of their response options

A consensus among researchers about the best way to assess self-reported drug use has not yet emerged. This study evaluates the effect of different response options on the distribution, reliability, and validity of scores on drug-use items. The results suggest that more quantitative measures are not necessarily more reliable or valid than less quantitative measures of drug use. A consensus among researchers about the best way to mea-sure self-reported drug use has not yet emerged (Huba & Bent-ler, 1982; Huba, Bentler, & Newcomb, 1981). The average prod-uct-moment correlation between 14 pairs of experts who rated the adequacy of 17 drug-use quantity and frequency items was only 0.12 (Huba, Bentler, & Newcomb, 1981). Criteria used to evaluate drug-use measures are implicit, and item selection tends to be guided by personal preferences and intuition. Response formats used in drug-use surveys have varied from qualitative (such as Huba, Wingard, & Bentler, 1981) to quanti-tative (such as Huba, Bentler, & Newcomb, 1981) to extremel