The Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST-10)
Recommended frequency: Every 4 weeks
Summary
The Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST-10) is a 10-item brief screening tool that can be administered by a clinician or self-administered. This tool assesses drug use, not including alcohol or tobacco use, in the past 12 months. Each question requires a yes or no response, and the tool can be completed in less than 8 minutes.
Psychometric Properties of the DAST-10
The original DAST contained 28 items that were modelled after the widely used Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test (Selzer, American Journal of Psychiatry, 1971). Two shortened versions of the DAST were devised using 20 items and 10 items that were good discriminators. The 20 item DATS correlated almost perfectly (r = .99) with the original. Moreover, the internal consistency reliability (alpha) was extremely high. The DAST-10 correlated very high (r = 0.98) with the DAST-20 and has excellent internal consistency reliability for such a brief scale (.92 across the total sample).
The DAST instruments (10, 20 and 28) tend to have moderate to high levels of test-retest, interitem, and item-total reliabilities. They also tend to have moderate to high levels of validity, sensitivity, and specificity. In general, all versions of the DAST yield satisfactory measures of reliability and validity for use as clinical or research tools.
Sources: