The Self-Report Symptom Inventory

The Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) was developed to expand the toolbox of self-report instruments available to detect symptom overreporting. Such instruments, today known as symptom validity tests, play a crucial role in both forensic evaluations and in a range of clinical referral questions. The SRSI was originally designed in the German language; items were selected from a larger pool on the basis of empirical results. Scores on the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology served as external criterion for the item selection procedure and empirical cut-score determination (gold standard). The SRSI is composed of five subscales describing potentially genuine symptoms and five pseudosymptoms subscales. Ten different language test versions have been developed so far. The article describes the background of the construction of the scale, the main empirical results with the SRSI, the conditions of use, and the limits of applicability. With research ongoing in several countries and with a variety of language versions, a larger body of empirical evidence can be expected to accumulate in the coming years.