The Children of Alcoholics Screening Test: reliability and relationship to family environment, adjustment, and alcohol-related stressors of adolescent offspring of alcoholics.

The Children of Alcoholics Screening Test (CAST) had acceptably high internal consistency (.88 and .90) and test-retest reliabilities (.88) when administered to adolescents from intact alcoholic families. CAST scores were unrelated to measures of adolescent adjustment or indices that reflect general family environment. However, CAST scores did correlate positively with a measure of the more specific family environment related to alcohol abuse. The study suggested that CAST scores are best suited for screening respondents and not as a dependent variable because the relationships that one is likely to identify between CAST scores and any other variable would be primarily reflective of group differences between offspring of alcoholics and nonalcoholics.