The Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R) is a relatively brief
self-report
A self-report study is a type of survey, questionnaire, or poll in which respondents read the question and select a response by themselves without any outside interference. A ''self-report'' is any method which involves asking a participant ab ...
psychometric instrument (questionnaire) published by the
Clinical Assessment division of the
Pearson Assessment & Information group. It is designed to
evaluate
Evaluation is a
systematic determination and assessment of a subject's merit, worth and significance, using criteria governed by a set of standards. It can assist an organization, program, design, project or any other intervention or initiative ...
a broad range of psychological problems and symptoms of
psychopathology. It is also used in measuring the progress and outcome of
psychiatric
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorders. These include various maladaptations related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions. See glossary of psychiatry.
Initial psy ...
and
psychological treatments or for research purposes.
According to the overview given by the publisher, the SCL-90-R is
normed on individuals 13 years and older. It consists of 90 items and takes 12–15 minutes to administer, yielding nine scores along primary symptom dimensions and three scores among global
distress indices. The primary
symptom dimensions that are
assessed are
somatization
Somatization is a tendency to experience and communicate psychological distress in the form of bodily and organic symptoms and to seek medical help for them. More commonly expressed, it is the generation of physical symptoms of a psychiatric cond ...
,
obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity,
depression,
anxiety
Anxiety is an emotion which is characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is different than fear in that the former is defined as the anticipation of a future threat wh ...
,
hostility
Hostility is seen as form of emotionally charged aggressive behavior. In everyday speech it is more commonly used as a synonym for anger and aggression.
It appears in several psychological theories. For instance it is a facet of neuroticism in ...
, phobic anxiety,
paranoid ideation,
psychoticism Psychoticism is one of the three traits used by the psychologist Hans Eysenck in his P–E–N model ( psychoticism, extraversion and neuroticism) model of personality.
Nature
Psychoticism is conceptually similar to the ''constraint'' factor ...
, and a category of "additional items" which helps
clinicians assess other aspect of the clients symptoms (e.g. item 19, "
poor appetite"). The three indices are global wellness index,
hardiness, and symptom free.
A high number of studies have been conducted demonstrating the
reliability
Reliability, reliable, or unreliable may refer to:
Science, technology, and mathematics Computing
* Data reliability (disambiguation), a property of some disk arrays in computer storage
* High availability
* Reliability (computer networking), a ...
,
validity
Validity or Valid may refer to:
Science/mathematics/statistics:
* Validity (logic), a property of a logical argument
* Scientific:
** Internal validity, the validity of causal inferences within scientific studies, usually based on experiments
** ...
, and utility of the
instrument.
It is one of the most widely used measures of psychological distress in clinical practice and research. The Spanish adaptation was made by
Luis de Rivera, MD.
References
Checklists
Mental disorders screening and assessment tools
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