Development of a Screening Questionnaire for Schizophrenia

Abstract

THE purpose of this pilot study is to develop a simple, easily administered screening instrument to select from a large population of pregnant women who register for prenatal care those who have a known probability of being diagnosable as schizophrenic. The instrument will be used to aid in selection of families where one or both parents are schizophrenic for a longitudinal study of infants at high risk for schizophrenia. A considerable number of instruments have been developed for the assessment of personality and of mental disorder. From the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), subsets of scale 8 were selected to discriminate schizophrenia. They were, however, largely unsuccessful (Dahlstrom and Walsh^{1 (p284)} ). Dahlstrom and Wohler² applied discriminant function analysis to the problem and developed optimal weights for ten basic clinical scales. Other instruments that have been utilized for psychiatric appraisal include the Cornell Medical Index-Health Questionnaire (Brodman et