Detecting over-reporting of symptoms: the French version of the self-report symptom inventory

Abstract

Objective: Symptom exaggeration and malingering are core issues in forensic and clinical evaluation. Generally, experts use two main types of instruments to assess the credibility of symptoms: performance validity tests that aim to detect underperformance and self-report validity tests that appraise over-reporting of symptoms. However, while many tools can be used to assess underperformance, far fewer instruments are available to evaluate over-reporting of symptoms.

Methods: In this study, we adapted the Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) for use with French-speaking participants and tested its psychometric properties on a sample of 575 healthy adults (aged from 18 to 65 years), alongside various smaller subgroups.

Results: Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a two-factor structure for the scale, with a first factor including items questioning genuine symptoms and a second factor including items questioning bizarre or rare symptoms (i.e., pseudosymptoms). Additional analyses emphasized the SRSI’s excellent internal reliability and good convergent validity. Furthermore, our results revealed that both the symptom and pseudosymptom subscales were able to discriminate between participants who were asked to feign cognitive impairments (i.e., malingerers), healthy controls, and patients with genuine cognitive symptoms.

Conclusion: Overall, these results suggest that the SRSI may be considered a promising tool to assess the credibility of symptoms in patients evaluated in forensic contexts.

Keywords:

• Malingering
• validation
• psychometric properties
• brain injury

Acknowledgments

The authors thank T. Merten for his help with the back-translation. They also thank C. Crasborn and A. Piette for their help with the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.