A structured interview guide increases Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale reliability in raters with low clinical experience

Objective: To assess the beneficial impact of a structured interview on the reliability of BPRS ratings in raters with low clinical experience. Method: Each patient was rated once a week in two separate interviews, conducted on the same day. The first interview was conducted by a rater with low clinical experience (recruited from a group of five residents in psychiatry and one clinical psychologist in training). All second interviews were conducted by the same highly experienced psychiatrist. Results: The number of items with full agreement between observers increased with the use of SIG. The value of intraclass correlation coefficients for individual items and the total score also increased, approaching reported studies with experienced raters. Conclusion: These results suggest that the use of SIG reduces variability of information gathering in reliability testing of BPRS with less experienced raters.