Aim: To develop a brief, multi-dimensional instrument for assessing treatment outcome for people with drug and/or alcohol problems. The Maudsley Addiction Profile (MAP) is the first instrument to be developed in the United Kingdom for this purpose.
Design: Field testing with quota-recruitment of problem drug users and problem alcohol users in treatment with researcher and clinician-administered test-retest interviews.
Setting: Two community and two inpatient services at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital, London.
Participants: Subjects (160 drug users and 80 alcohol users) interviewed by eight interviews (four researchers and four clinicians), each of whom interviewed 30 subjects on two occasions.
Measures: Sixty items across substance use, health risk, physical/psychological health and personal/social functioning domains.
Findings: Average completion time of the MAP was 12 minutes. The questionnaire was acceptable to a majority of subjects and performed well with both researcher and clinician interviewers. Internal reliability and feasible concurrent validity assessments of the scales and items were highly satisfactory. Test-retest reliability was good, average intraclass correlation coefficients across eight substances were 0.94 and 0.81 across health risk, health problems, relationship conflict, employment and crime measures.
Conclusions: The MAP can serve as a core research instrument with additional outcome measures added as required. The collection of a set of reliable quantitative measures of problems among drug and alcohol users by research or treatment personnel for outcome evaluation purposes need not be time-consuming.