psychometric properties of 20-item and 10-item persian versions of drug abuse screening test

Introduction: substance use disorder is one of the most critical social problems in iran. for this disorder, weneed a proper assessment tool based on our indigenous culture.objective: this study assesses the factor structure and psychometric properties of 10-item and 20-item persian versions of drug abuse screening tests (dast-10 and dast-20).materials and methods: in this cross-sectional study, we randomly selected 200 participants referred to addiction treatment centers in rasht city, iran. after translation to persian and back-translation to english, the face and content validity of dast-10 and dast-20 persian versions were evaluated using the opinions of a panel of expertsand calculatingthe content validity ratio and content validity index. then, the construct validity was evaluated by confirmatory factor analysis(cfa), the cronbach α coefficient was used for assessing internal consistency, and the intraclass correlation coefficient (icc) was used for assessing test-retest reliability.results: the mean±sd age of participants was 39.02±11.67 years. the majority (50%) were in the age range of 30-50 years. based on the cfa fit indices, the two instruments had a good fit to the data, confirming the theoretical model root mean square error of approximation (rmsea) (rmsea for dast-20=0.080; rmsea for dast-10=0.055). the cronbach α values ​​of dast-20 and dast-10 were 0.772 and 0.749, respectively, indicating their good and acceptable internal consistency. their test-retest reliability was reported at 0.997 and 0.995 based on the results of icc, respectively. there was a strong and significant positive correlation between the scores of persian dast-20 and dast-10 (r=0.851, p=0.001).conclusion: the dast-20 and dast-10 persian versions which after correcting the model using confirmatory factor analysis, they were studies in dast-8 and dast-16 have good validity and reliability and can be used for screening the possible involvement of drugs in iranian samples.