Dimensions of outpatient neurotic pathology: Comparison of a clinical versus an empirical assessment

Assesses a set of 4 clinical clusters, defined by 31 items of the Symptom Distress Checklist (SCL), in terms of their comparability to 4 dimensions isolated in a principal axis factor analysis of the same set of 31 items. The clusters were labeled anxiety, depression, anger-hostility, and obsessive-compulsive-phobic, and were evolved through a clustering procedure involving 20 clinical judges. The factors were determined through a factor analysis of psychiatrists' ratings of 837 anxious neurotic outpatients involved in 3 clinical drug trials. Comparison between the 2 sets of syndromes was effected by casting the clinical clusters in the form of a hypothesis matrix and performing a Procrustes transformation on the original principal components factors. Results of the analysis indicate an extremely high coincidence between the clinical clusters and the transformed factors, implying that the dimensions isolated here possess substantial reliability. This finding, and the high degree of similarity observed between the present dimensions and those identified in previous research, suggest that these factors may represent "core" dimensions of neurotic psychopathology. (35 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).