Reliability and validity of the Mini PAS-ADD for assessing psychiatric disorders in adults with intellectual disability.
Support workers can spot psychiatric disorders in adults with ID correctly four times out of five using the Mini PAS-ADD checklist.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers tested the Mini PAS-ADD, an 86-item checklist, on adults with intellectual disability. Support workers filled out the form. Clinicians then gave their own expert opinion on the same people.
The team compared the two sets of ratings to see how often they agreed.
What they found
The support workers' ratings matched the clinicians' diagnoses 81% of the time. That level of agreement is good enough for a community screening tool.
How this fits with other research
Guest et al. (2013) later repeated the idea in French. They used the shorter PAS-ADD Checklist and also got positive results, but sensitivity dropped to 55%. The French version is still usable—just expect more false negatives.
Stinton et al. (2010) extended the tool to a specific genetic group. They gave the PAS-ADD to 92 adults with Williams syndrome and found 24% had anxiety or phobias. The same screening family works outside general ID.
Prasher et al. (1995) ran a parallel study with the Reiss Screen. Both tools use carer reports, but Reiss targets behavior problems while Mini PAS-ADD targets psychiatric disorders. Both passed their reliability tests, giving clinicians two solid choices.
Why it matters
If you work with adults who have ID, you now have an 81% accurate checklist that frontline staff can complete in minutes. Use the Mini PAS-ADD to spot possible psychiatric cases early and refer on to clinicians. It saves time, cuts guesswork, and flags issues that otherwise hide behind communication barriers.
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Print the Mini PAS-ADD, pick one adult you worry about, and have the closest support worker fill it out today.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Mini PAS-ADD is an assessment schedule for psychiatric disorders in people with an intellectual disability. It is designed to provide a link between the mental health expertise of psychiatrists and psychologists, and the detailed knowledge of individual service users possessed by support staff. In broad terms, the aim of the Mini PAS-ADD is to enable non-psychiatrists accurately to recognize clinically significant psychiatric disorders in the people who they care for, so that they can make informed referral decisions. The instrument comprises 86 psychiatric symptoms and generates a series of subscores on: depression, anxiety and phobias, mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychosis, unspecified disorder (including dementia), and pervasive developmental disorder (autism). The present paper reports the results of a study investigating internal consistency, inter-rater agreement and validity in relation to clinical opinion, using a sample of 68 people with intellectual disability who were in contact with psychiatric services. In terms of the instrument fulfilling its main intended function, i.e. accurate case recognition, the crucial question was whether the support workers, with their lesser knowledge of psychopathology, were also able to correctly identify cases identified by expert clinicians. The validity results in this respect (81% agreement on case recognition) were sufficiently good that it is to be anticipated that the Mini PAS-ADD should have a significant impact on the identification of psychiatric disorders in the community of people with intellectual disability.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1998 · doi:10.1046/j.1365-2788.1998.00146.x