Open Access Diagnostic Instruments

 

 

The Mental Health Research and Treatment Center (MHRTC) at Ruhr-University Bochum´s Faculty of Psychology is committed to promoting the use of reliable and valid instruments for the assessment of mental health and related variables across the lifespan.


In order to promote the wider use of such assessment instruments, we strive to make those developed at our center available as “open access documents” that can be downloaded for non-commercial purposes free of charge. The copyright remains with the authors indicated for each instrument.

Below you can find the instruments currently available together with associated materials. If you decide to use any of the instruments we kindly ask you to refer to them using the references indicated for each scale or interview.

If you have questions, you can reach the authors under the following address or right here via the website.

 

Structured clinical interviews for mental disorders

Structured clinical interviews are essential tools for rapid, reliable, and comprehensive diagnosis. In the German-speaking world, the DIPS family of interviews is available for the diagnosis of mental disorders over the entire lifespan:

Mental disorders in adulthood:

Diagnostic Interview for Mental Disorders - Open Access (Diagnostisches Interview bei psychischen Störungen - Open Access, DIPS-OA; Margraf, Cwik, Suppiger, and Schneider, 2017)
Short Interview for Mental Disorders – Open Access (Diagnostisches Kurz-Interview bei psychischen Störungen - Open Access; Mini-DIPS-OA; Margraf and Cwik, 2017).

 Mental disorders in childhood and adolescence:

Diagnostic Interview for Mental Disorders in Children and Adolescents – Open Access (Diagnostisches Interview bei psychischen Störungen im Kindes- und Jugendalter – Open Access, Kinder-DIPS-OA, Schneider, Pflug, In-Albon, and Margraf, 2017)
Diagnostic Interview for Regulatory Disorders (Diagnostisches Interview bei Regulationsstörungen im Säuglings- und Kleinkindalter, Baby-DIPS, Schneider and Wolke, 2007)

 

These clinical interviews have been regularly updated since the 90s, and their reliability, validity, and acceptability has been repeatedly tested in large samples using outpatient, inpatient, and research populations. The latest version of the DIPS interviews is based on DSM-5 but allows easy transformation into ICD-10 diagnoses. To promote the wider use of structured clinical interviews, the instruments of the DIPS family are now provided as "open access documents".