Psychometric Properties of the Turkish Versions of the Drug Use Disorders Identification Test (DUDIT) and the Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST-10) in the Prison Setting

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate psychometric properties of the Drug Use Disorders Identification Test (DUDIT) and the Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST-10) in prisoners with (n = 124) or without (n = 78) drug use disorder. Participants were evaluated with the DUDIT, the DAST-10, and the Addiction Profile Index-Short (API-S). The DUDIT and the DAST-10 were found to be psychometrically sound drug abuse screening measures with high convergent validity when compared with each other (r = 0.86), and API-S (r = 0.88 and r = 0.84, respectively), and to have a Cronbach's alpha of 0.93 and 0.87, respectively. In addition, a single component accounted for 58.28% of total variance for DUDIT, whereas this was 47.10% for DAST-10. The DUDIT had sensitivity and specificity scores of 0.95 and 0.79, respectively, when using the optimal cut-off score of 10, whereas these scores were 0.88 and 0.74 for the DAST-10 when using the optimal cut-off score of 4. Additionally, both the DUDIT and the DAST-10 showed good discriminant validity as they differentiated prisoners with drug use disorder from those without. Findings support the Turkish versions of both the DUDIT and the DAST-10 as reliable and valid drug abuse screening instruments that measure unidimensional constructs.