130 ASSESSMENT AND INTERVENTION STRATEGIES
can take upwards of 2 hours to administer, they require some degree of training, and
the published booklets can be quite costly. Nevertheless, we believe that the wealth of
information obtained from an interview like the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule
for DSM-IV (ADIS-IV) or the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disor-
ders (SCID-IV) justifies the investment in clinical resources (see Miller, 2002, for cost–
benefit analysis).
Although a fairly wide selection of interviews is available to the clinician, the ADIS-
IV (Brown, Di Nardo, & Barlow, 1994) and SCID-IV (First, Spitzer, Gibbon, & Wil-
liams, 1997) have become the most widely used interviews in North America. Both
are clinician- administered, semistructured interviews designed to make a differential
diagnosis based on DSM-IV-TR criteria (APA, 2000). The SCID for Axis I has a pub-
lished clinician version (SCID-CV) that covers the DSM-IV-TR diagnoses most com-
monly seen in clinical practice, whereas the unpublished research version (SCID-RV)
is much longer and includes numerous diagnostic subtypes and course specifiers (First
et al., 1997). Summerfeldt and Antony (2002) concluded that the SCID is superior in
its breadth of diagnostic coverage and there is evidence of good interrater reliability for
many of the most common diagnostic disorders (Williams et al., 1992; Riskind, Beck,
Berchick, Brown, & Steer, 1987). However the SCID-CV provides only a brief symptom
screener for certain anxiety disorders like specific phobia, GAD, social phobia, and ago-
raphobia without a history of panic disorder while failing to assess past history of other
disorders. In order to obtain an accurate diagnosis of specific anxiety disorders, the
SCID-CV must be supplemented with additional symptom questions from the SCID-
RV. The addition of dimensional severity ratings on situational triggers is also recom-
mended in order to provide important clinical data on the specific anxiety disorders
(Summerfeldt & Antony, 2002).
The best diagnostic interview for the anxiety disorders is the ADIS-IV. Although
the ADIS-IV has current and lifetime versions available for adults, the current version
will be of most relevance in clinical practice. It includes sections on each of the anxiety
disorders as well as highly comorbid conditions (e.g., mood disorders, hypochondriasis,
alcohol/drug abuse or dependence). In each of the anxiety disorder sections, severity
and distress ratings are obtained on specific symptoms, and the Hamilton Rating Scale
of Anxiety (HRSA; Hamilton, 1959) and Hamilton Rating Scale of Depression (HRSD;
Hamilton, 1960) are included so that the scales can be administered during the inter-
view. Although the ADIS-IV covers all the key diagnostic criteria for the anxiety disor-
ders, it goes well beyond DSM-IV-TR by providing information on psychopathological
phenomena that are targeted in interventions for anxiety (e.g., partial symptom expres-
sion, avoidance, situational triggers, and apprehension).
The ADIS-IV has high interrater reliability for the DSM-IV-TR anxiety and mood
disorders (see review by Summerfeldt & Antony, 2002). Brown and Barlow (2002)
reported that the ADIS-IV current or lifetimes versions had good to excellent inter-
rater agreement for principal diagnoses based on a clinical sample of 362 outpatients
(see also Brown, Di Nardo, Lehman, & Campbell, 2001). Kappas for two indepen-
dent interviews conducted within a 2-week interval ranged from .67 for GAD to .86
for specific phobia. The most common source of disagreement among the interviewers
involved whether a case met threshold criteria for a particular anxiety disorder as well
as information variance across interviews (i.e., patients giving different information to
the interviewers). Summerfeldt and Antony (2002) noted that although the ADIS-IV