Psychometric properties of the Japanese version of the standardised assessment of personality abbreviated scale

Abstract

This study was undertaken to translate the Standardised Assessment of Personality – Abbreviated Scale (SAPAS) into Japanese and to evaluate its validity and reliability. SAPAS is one of the most rapid tools for assessing personality disorder (PD) and has excellent sensitivity and good specificity, whereas other PD assessment tools require such a significant investment of time that they are infeasible for large surveys or routine clinical practice. Customary assessment in clinical practice ideally incorporates screening for PD, as it is associated with a substantial public health burden, including premature mortality and increased health service utilization. Furthermore, PD’s status as a key prognostic variable of mental disorders also drives PD screening. While SAPAS has been translated into several languages, there has been no Japanese version. Therefore, we translated SAPAS into Japanese (SAPAS-J) and evaluated its reliability and validity. Study 1 recruited undergraduates to reveal its test–retest reliability. Although its internal consistency was not high, since the intent of the original SAPAS was to assess the broad character of personality disorder with the fewest possible items, minimal correlations between items were reasonable. We tested two factorial models, the single-factor model and the higher-order-single-factor model, and the latter offered better fitting. This higher-order model contained a three-factor structure corresponding to clusters described in DSM-5. It measures general PD traits as a common higher-order latent variable comprising those factors. Correlations of SAPAS-J with the much longer PD screening questionnaire in Study 1 and depressive and anxiety symptoms in Study 2 from the general population support its validity. Although validation for the clinical use of SAPAS-J is limited, our research with non-clinical populations demonstrated sufficient validity to justify its use in the context of psychopathological analog research. Since PD is understood as a continuum, the severity of which is distributed dimensionally, the analog study recruiting from the general population and attempting to reveal psychopathological mechanisms of PD is meaningful.