Validity of the substance abuse subtle screening inventory-adolescent version (SASSI-A).

The construct and convergent validity of the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Instrument-Adolescent (SASSI-A) were examined in a population of suburban youth offenders. The analysis was conducted on archived data of 490 adolescent offenders from a suburban Circuit Court-Juvenile Division. Exploratory factor analysis results best supported a 5-factor solution that accounted for a modest 32.5% of the total variance. This 5-factor solution had a poor goodness of fit with the purported factor structure upon which the formal SASSI-A scoring is based. The relationship between the SASSI-A and variables with known relationships to adolescent substance abuse (i.e., lack of religious involvement, single parent household, learning disability, early onset of use, conduct problems) was examined. Results revealed moderately strong relationships between the SASSI-A and these variables, indicating reasonable convergent validity. It is concluded that the SASSI-A face valid scales have moderate utility for identifying substance dependence within this sample, while the subtle scales do not.