Assessing Substance-Related Disorders in Asian Americans

Abstract

In this chapter, substance use disorder assessment instruments will be reviewed. This chapter is divided into two primary sections. The first section discusses general alcohol and substance abuse and dependence measures that have evidence for their effective use in Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI). Some measures assess only one drug class while others assess general drug and alcohol misuse. The second section reviews alcohol abuse and dependence assessment measures that have been researched for use in AAPI subgroups. The psychometric evidence of each assessment instrument will be discussed when available in addition to specific AAPI subgroups and ages the instruments have support in. For psychometric evidence, published reports often include estimates of reliability/precision, as well as sensitivity and specificity the estimates. A number of studies have also used receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analyses, to determine sensitivity, specificity and a variety of other psychometric properties of the substance abuse instruments. Briefly, in ROC analyses, the area under the ROC curve (AUC) indicates the ability of a test score to distinguish between two groups, for example substance use and nonsubstance use groups. An AUC of 1.00 indicates perfect classification while and AUC of 0.50 indicates classification rate at chance levels. AUCs between 0.80 and 0.90 indicate good classification accuracy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)