The Psychometric Properties of the Drug Abuse Screening Test

Background: substance abuse is a critical problem in most countries, especially in developing ones. early detection is the pre-requisite of early control, for which reliable and valid tools are required. in the present study, we aimed at measuring the psychometric properties of the 10-item drug abuse screening test (dast-10) in iranian individuals. methods: after translation and back- translation of the questionnaire, 244 adults were recruited from tehran megacity, iran, and completed the questionnaires. participants were recruited by a multistage randomized cluster sampling method. reliability was determined by cronbach’s alpha. also, construct validity was evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) and exploratory factor analysis (efa). findings: the internal consistency using cronbach's alpha coefficients for the total score of the persian version of dast-10 was 0.93. efa evoked only one factor for dast-10. the cfa for 1-factor models for dast-10 indicated an acceptable fit for the proposed models. conclusion: the results prove desirable reliability and validity of the persian version of the dast which can be utilized as a screening instrument for drug abuse among iranian adults.