Objective: The aim of the study was to establish the concurrent validity of a telephone-administered version of the survey measures utilized in the Gospel Oak studies, the core of which was the SHORT-CARE.
Design: Comparisons were made between data obtained by administering the interview in its conventional, face-to-face form with those generated by conducting it by telephone.
Setting: A UK teaching hospital.
Patients: Elderly subjects of both sexes, recruited from geriatric and psychogeriatric day hospitals.
Measures: The Depression Diagnostic Scale, Dementia Diagnostic Scale and Organic Brain Syndrome scale (all taken from the SHORT-CARE) and the London Handicap Scale.
Results: For depressive symptomatology, cognitive impairment, subjective memory impairment and handicap, intraclass correlations were 0.86, 0.89, 0.83 and 0.70, respectively. The kappa coefficient for agreement on case-level diagnosis of pervasive depression was 0.79.
Conclusions: These results indicate that the instrument is broadly reliable when administered by telephone.