De Nederlandse versie van de Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) als maat voor klachtenoverdrijving

The Dutch version of the Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) as a measure of symptom exaggeration Harald Merckelbach, Thomas Merten, Brechje Dandachi-FitzGerald, Irena Boskovic To evaluate the psychometric qualities of the Dutch translation of the Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI), we carried out an experiment with honest controls (n = 51), participants instructed to feign pain symptoms (n = 54), and participants instructed to feign post-traumatic stress symptoms (n = 53). All were students and the instructed feigners among them were asked to over-report their symptoms in a balanced way. Overall, results were well in line with those that have been obtained with the German version of the SRSI. Cronbach alpha’s for scales and subscales were high (all alpha’s ≥ 0.80), and the cut points for over-reporting pseudosymptoms – 6 as a screening and 9 as a conservative cut score – yielded false positive percentages below 10%, while sensitivities varied - depending on type of feigning instructions – between 48% and 77%. Most importantly, our data indicate that the subscales are differentially sensitive to the type of psychopathology that feigners want to exaggerate and that the so called ratio index is an informative parameter signaling indiscriminant symptom endorsement