Improving the Evaluation of Adult Mental Disorders in the Criminal Justice System With Computerized Adaptive Testing.

OBJECTIVE

The authors sought to develop and validate a suite of dimensional measures of psychiatric syndromes for use in a criminal justice population.

METHODS

The previously validated Computerized Adaptive Test-Mental Health (CAT-MH) was administered to a sample of 475 defendants in the Cook County Bond Court. Item-level data were used to determine which test items exhibited differential item functioning in this population compared with the population used for the original calibration.

RESULTS

After removal of nine items that exhibited differential item functioning from the CAT-MH, correlations between scores based on the original calibration from a nonjustice-involved population and the newly computed scores based on a sample of bond court defendants showed a correlation coefficient of r=0.96 to r=0.99.

CONCLUSIONS

With a slight modification of the original CAT-MH, the tool was successfully used to measure severity of depression, anxiety, mania and/or hypomania, suicidality, and substance use disorder in an English- and Spanish-speaking criminal justice population.