Paper
Factor Structure of an Internet-Based Symptom Checklist and Correlation with Conventional Rating Scales
- Authors:
- C. Thomas Gualtieri
- Abstract
- The Neuropsych Questionnaire (NPQ) addresses two important clinical issues: how to screen patients from a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders quickly and efficiently; and how to acquire independent verification of a patient’s complaints. The NPQ is available on the Internet in both adult and pediatric versions, and its adult version consists of 207 simple questions about common symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorders. The NPQ reports give the scores of the patient’s and/or observer’s responses in terms of 20 symptom clusters: inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, learning problems, memory, anxiety, panic, agoraphobia, obsessions and compulsions, social anxiety, depression, mood instability, mania, aggression, psychosis, somatization, fatigue, sleep, suicide, pain and substance abuse. In this paper, the factor analysis with a large number of patients are carried out to investigate the factor structure of the NPQ and report the correspondence between the NPQ and other clinical RSs in common use. This analysis generates three distinct factors: cognitive, somatic and manic– and anxiety- depression. The symptoms scales composed of the anxiety-depression factor load equally with those of the mania and somatic factors but not those of the cognitive factor. In summary, the NPQ is a useful tool in neuropsychiatric practice. It also generates interesting data about the nature of symptom self-report and its relationship with specific psychiatric diagnoses.
- Keywords
- Neuropsych Questionnaire; Symptom Questionnaire; Self-Rating
- StartPage
- 18
- EndPage
- 26
- Doi