I will be using CES-D tool to determine the prevalence of depression in a population and this tool has been validated to the local setting as a self-administered questionnaire. It has very high sensitivity and specificity.
But during my study can i use it as an interviewer-administered questionnaire?
Thank you ..
I see no big problem with using the CES-D since it is well-validated and widely used as a self-administered questionnaire. The only problem that could arise is interviewer bias (or information bias or a similar bias) which arises because the participant is hesitant to answer the questions honestly because the interviewer will know the answers to such personal questions. Thus, the participant may be tempted to not answer honestly because of this lack of privacy.
A possible solution would be to have the interviewee answer the questions in a paper-and-pencil form while the interviewer looks the other way, and then places the answer sheet in an envelope without the interviewer seeing it. This may provide the 'anonymity' that could result in more honest answers. You might also check the literature to see if the CES-D is also administered by an interviewer and if it is validated that way.
There might be cross-cultural issues, but the CES-D is widely used as an interviewer-administered tool in the U.S.
You can do this. Of course, you'll need to adapt the questions slightly and also provide guidance to the interviewer(s) about how to handle queries posed by those being interviewed - since that can't happen with a self-report measure!
It's also important that you compute and report the reliability statistics for the interview, because it is not similar enough to the self-report to just use the known qualities of the latter. (Actually, you should do this even if you use the self-report, but in that case, you could have gotten away with not doing so.)
If you are very conscientious, it would make sense to run a small pilot study of your interview before undertaking the main study. This could examine inter-rater reliability (i.e., how closely do the results obtained by two separate interviewers agree?) or validity vis a vis the self-report (i.e., how closely do results correspond in a sample of people who complete both measures?).
I agree with Jerry and Stephen but what David raises is for me most relevant. Many psicological tests developed and implemented in developed countries (in this case USA) must be adapted in some of its variables and terminology to sociocultural conditions of developing country. This is related to decoding frames of the respondents. It could be even more important to develop an Interviewer-administered questionnaire as procedure and not a self-administered questionnaire since it makes possible clarification of some terms that the interviewed could not understand. It also allows the interviewer to take note about which of the questions raise difficulties or are problematic for respondents and also allows to gather contextual informations, all of which then serves for the interpretation of the results. Of course in that case the interviewers must be well trained to avoid bias as suggested by Stephen.
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