Page 76 - PhD GT

“was designed to be comparable with the Severity of Alcohol Dependence Questionnaire (SADQ) (Stockwell et al. 1979), and bears a close resemblance to that instrument”
(Sutherland et al. 1986 p. 486)
Like the SADQ but appearing in a different order, the SODQ consists of five sections containing items which are said to correspond to i) quantity and pattern of opiate use, ii) physical symptoms of withdrawal, iii) affective symptoms of withdrawal, iv) withdrawal-relief drug taking and v) rapidity of reinstatement of withdrawal symptoms after a period of abstinence. Like the authors of the SADQ (Stockwell et al. 1979), Sutherland et al. reported that they had found the subjective elements of dependence too difficult to measure: “Similar problems were experienced in trying to tap these rather subtle aspects in relation to opiate dependence.” (Sutherland et al. 1986 p. 486).
After going through a series of pilot stages the final version of the SODQ was administered to 98 out-patients attending an addiction treatment clinic in New York. In addition to demographic data and questions about drug use milestones, researchers also asked two questions which they described as tapping the narrowing of the drug taking repertoire and the presence of tolerance and five supplementary questions describing as tapping a subjective sense of being “hooked” to which they referred as the “Opiate Subjective Dependence Questionnaire” (OSDQ). These questions appear to tap those very items to which they referred as being too subtle to include in the main inventory and which themselves came to be the constituent items of the Severity of Dependence Scale (SDS) described below. It is not clear why these questions were not included in the main scale.
The majority of the respondents (91 out of 98) in the New York clinic sample used heroin, while the remaining seven used a variety of synthetic and semi-synthetic opioids as their main drug of choice. In preliminary factor analysis two items with the lowest loadings, one from the withdrawal relief section and one from the reinstatement section, were excluded from further analysis which was conducted with scores from four of the five sections (excluding the quantity and pattern of use section). Subsequently the three sections testing physical and affective withdrawal and withdrawal relief were each found to be dominated by a single main factor but the reinstatement section was found not to be unidimensional; only 70 respondents were able to complete it as the rest had not had the two week period of abstinence at any time required by the questions in this section. However, internal consistency of each of the sections as measured by Cronbach’s alpha was found
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