Do mental health service users reliably report their clinical diagnoses and health histories in epidemiological surveys?

AIMS: Self-report checklists are commonly used to collect health information in social and epidemiological studies. Little is known about the reliability of such self-report data. This study examined the 6-month test-retest reliability of 28 clinical diagnoses and health histories as self-reported by a sample of adult female mental health service users.

METHODS

A convenience sample of female mental health service users (N = 293) provided self-report data on their health histories - including physical, psychiatric, neurodevelopmental and functional domains - two times, approximately 6 months apart. We calculated the agreement rates and Cohen's kappa of the results.

RESULTS

The results demonstrated high levels of temporal consistency. Agreement rates were ≥84.5% for all conditions, while Cohen's kappa values were above 0.50 for 21 out of 28 conditions.

CONCLUSIONS

Self-report checklists, as widely used in survey studies, can yield reliable health data. Social and health science researchers can employ such checklists to collect health background information of research participants, especially when clinical validation is not feasible or when hospital records are not accessible.