Measurement of obsessive-compulsive symptomatology: utility of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist.

The Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL) was administered to 62 obsessive-compulsive and 49 nonobsessional patients to examine the reliability and validity of the obsessive-compulsive scale as well as four additional subscales identified in previous research. Test-retest correlation coefficients were generally below acceptable levels. Analyses of construct validity suggested that the obsessive-compulsive scale correlated significantly with other measures of such symptomatology only after treatment when the range of scores was broader than before treatment. The HSCL detected change following treatment on the total score and on four of the five clusters. The obsessive-compulsive scale effectively discriminated obsessive-compulsive patients from other anxious-neurotic patients but a reliable cut-off score that did not misclassify a substantial percentage of patients could not be found.