Case: Computer assigned symptom evaluation: An instrument for psychiatric epidemiological application

This paper describes the use of computer technology for application in psychiatric epidemiology. A computer dictionary was devised which can systematically evaluate natural language text. The concepts and frame of reference in the Stirling County Studies comprised the analytic model for the computer design. The software for the system was the General Inquirer system of computer programs. A sample of 120 respondents who made up a panel of individuals followed in a longitudinal study were used to construct and validate the instrument. The basic data were interviews conducted by psychiatrists. The interviews.were evaluated by the psychiatrists according to Stirling County Evaluation schema. Sixty-one interviews were randomly drawn as the documents for the construction of the inputs to the computer system. The remaining 59 interviews were used to cross-calibrate the efforts in the first stage. The computed results were measured against psychiatrist ratings. For the majority of the categories of assessment, the congruence between the computer and psychiatrists was significantly high. The applications and limitations of the computer model of evaluation, called CASE, were then outlined.