Is there a substitute for Structured Interview assessments of type A behaviour?

Discriminant analyses, attempting to predict the Type A behaviour categorization achieved by means of the Structured Interview (SI), were carried out on the responses of 93 British males to the Jenkins Activity Survey and the Framingham Scale, together with information regarding their smoking habits, alcohol consumption, tea and coffee drinking and obesity levels, all of which have been suggested as risk factors for coronary heart disease. Where classification agreements with the SI were found to be above 50 per cent, classification functions based on the discriminant analyses were calculated from the responses of 36 additional male subjects. The actual SI categories were compared with the predicted categories for this second subject group. The results indicated that no reliable and robust alternative was available to predict the SI categorization. The implications of these results for the substitution of the SI by self-report questionnaires are discussed.