Initial Validation of the Vanderbilt ADHD Measure for Adolescent Patients in the ICISS Project

This proposal is to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Vanderbilt ADHD screening tool for use with adolescents and young adults aged 13-21 years. The Vanderbilt is a previously developed, freely available set of parent- and teacher-report questionnaires designed to identify ADHD and related disorders in children. The Vanderbilt measures have been chosen for inclusion in the new computerized Integrated Clinical Information Sharing System (ICISS) being rolled out in five Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) departments/divisions (Adolescent/Young Adult Practice, Children's Hospital Primary Care Center, Developmental Medicine Center, Department of Neurology, Department of Psychiatry). The Vanderbilt was developed and validated for use among children up to age 12 years (Wolraich et al., 2003; Wolraich et al., 2013; Bard et al., 2013), and little is known about its appropriateness for use among older youth. In addition, there is no self-report version of the Vanderbilt that can be administered directly to adolescents and young adults (ages 13-21 years), for whom parents and teachers are often less knowledgeable reporters. To address these shortcomings, a multidisciplinary team of BCH adolescent health clinicians and researchers modified the parent and teacher Vanderbilt questionnaires to make them age-appropriate for adolescents and young adults and created a complementary self-report version for adolescents and young adults. The goal of the current study is to 1) assess the feasibility and acceptability of online administration through the ICISS system of the new parent, teacher, and youth self-report Vanderbilt measures among adolescent and young adult BCH patients aged 13-21 years; 2) test their reliability in terms of internal consistency reliability, temporal stability of responses over a one-month test-retest, and inter-rater agreement across all informants (parents, teachers, and youths); and 3) test their validity by evaluating their convergence with a similar set of ADHD screening tools, the Conners scales, already validated for use with adolescents and young adults.