Objective: The psychometric properties of the Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST-10), developed to screen individuals for drug problems, are evaluated in Turkish patients with drug use disorder.
Method: Participants included 100 adolescents with drug use disorder in a substance abuse treatment program for adolescents, 123 heroin dependent adults in a residential substance abuse treatment program, and 35 alcohol dependents from the same clinic who did not report a drug abuse problem.
Results: The DAST-10 was found to be a psychometrically sound drug abuse screening measure with high convergent validity (r=0.76) when correlation with the Drug Use Disorders Identification Test (DUDIT) was measured and to have a Cronbachs alpha of 0.92. In addition, a single component accounted for 59.35% of total variance, and the DAST-10 had sensitivity and specificity scores of 0.98 and 0.91, respectively, when using the optimal cut-off score of 4. Additionally, the DAST-10 showed good discriminant validity as it significantly differentiated patients with drug use disorder from alcohol dependents.
Conclusions: These findings support the DAST as a reliable and valid drug abuse screening instrument that measures a unidimensional construct. Further research is warranted with additional clinical populations and with high risk populations such as those in criminal justice settings.
Key words: DAST-10, drug abuse, factorial structure, reliability, validity
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