[Evaluation of the Brazilian version of the CRAFFT/CESARE scale for screening drug use by adolescents].

The scope of this article is to present the Brazilian version of the CRAFFT scale for screening drug use among adolescents and to assess its comprehensibility. It is a descriptive and quantitative study, which evaluated the applicability of the Brazilian version of the CRAFFT scale through a convenience sample of adolescents aged 14-21 enrolled at two technical schools. Three main aspects were evaluated: difficulty in understanding the scale; the validity of the translated scale comparing a subsample (28,8%) that also filled out the CEBRID questionnaire; and the percentage of adolescents who scored positive on the CRAFFT/CESARE using the pre-established cutoff point. The kappa coefficient was applied to establish correspondence between questionnaires and the ROC curve was used to evaluate the psychometric differences within different cutoffs. The CRAFFT/CESARE scale was applied in 2005 students, of which 1882 are within the defined age bracket. Only 2.2% of adolescents had difficulty in understanding the questions. The specificity of the CRAFFT/CESARE scale was 73.3%, and sensitivity was 87.1%. The concordance degree (Kappa) was considered good (0.461). The CRAFFT/CESARE scored positive in 36.2% of the adolescents.