DEVELOPMENT AND RELIABILITY OF THE FAMILY HISTORY INTERVIEW FOR PERSONALITY-DISORDERS

This paper presents the rationale, development, and interrater reliability of the Family History Interview for Personality Disorders (FHIPD), a new instrument for the family history assessment of the 11 DSM-III-R personality disorders. In order to assess reliability, diagnoses were derived for 147 first degree relatives of 50 outpatients. The outpatients were interviewed on two occasions, 4-6 weeks apart, by different interviewers. Employing kappa, reliability of the individual diagnoses ranged from .39 to 1.00, with a median of .60. Kappas for the three personality disorder clusters were .60 for Cluster A, .63 for Cluster B, and .67 for Cluster C. Kappa for the presence of any personality disorder was .63. Overall, the family history assessment of Ards II disorders appears to be reasonably reliable. Future work should focus on an examination of the validity of the instrument.