© 1993 Medical Council on Alcoholism SEVERITY OF ALCOHOL DEPENDENCE; RATING BY PATIENT RECORDS

Abstract —,A method to assess the severity of alcohol dependence by rating patient records was developed using the items of the 'alcohol abuse ' subscale of the Swedish version of the Alcohol Use Inventory (AVI). The records of 37 alcoholics were rated and the scores were compared with the patients ' self-report scores of the AVI and clinical assessments based on the structured clinical interview for DSM-III-R (SCID). The inter-rater reliability was rs = 0.88. The correlations between the record ratings and the alcoholics ' self-ratings were rs = 0.77 for both raters and 0.55-0.57 between the record ratings and the total SCID-scores. The correlations between the self-ratings and SCID-scores were rs = 0.90. It is suggested that this method may facilitate record-based follow-up studies of alcoholics.