Chavez LM, et al. - The current study was interested in exploring the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the AC-OK Screen for Co-occurring Disorders for first and second generation immigrant Latinos in Massachusetts, USA, and Madrid and Barcelona, Spain. The present data indicated that Spanish AC-OK was effective in detecting co-occurring disorders in preventive care and could be used for clinical research and for routine screening at treatment centers.

Methods

• For the purpose of this study, 567 Latino members were enlisted in waiting areas of clinics or by referral from Primary Care, Mental Health, Substance Use, and HIV Treatment Clinics, as well as Community Agencies.
• The authors in this study used confirmatory factor analyses to assess the factor structure, correlation analysis to inspect concurrent and discriminant validity, and receiver operating curves (ROC) to determine the ability of the AC-OK to approximate a composite of established instruments designed to measure depression, generalized anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, alcohol, and drugs (including benzodiazepines) as external criteria.

Results

• The analysis in this study showed that the original two factor structure was replicated in samples of Latino respondents in the US and Spain.
• Findings revealed that correlations with other measures followed the expected pattern.
• ROC analyses suggested that the AC-OK scale was an adequate approximation to other specific measures of mental health (ROC = 0.90) and substance abuse problems (ROC = 0.83) in both the US and Spain.