The development of a culture specific screening questionnaire NSRQ-20 for use in psychiatric epidemiology: a preliminary report.

A list of ten culture-specific symptoms frequently volunteered by Nigerian patients with Minor Psychiatric Disorders was added to the twenty items of the SRQ-20. The resultant 30-item questionnaire (SRQ-30) discriminated very well between a sample of new non-psychotic psychiatric referrals and a sample of subjects with very low probability of caseness (relatives of the new psychiatric referrals). Elimination of items of the SRQ-30 which poorly discriminated between the sample of psychiatric referrals and a matched sample of general hospital patients (ten items) produced the Nigerian version of the SRQ-20 (NSRQ-20) whose sensitivity is shown to be higher than that of the SRQ-30. Further validation study and future research trends on the NSRQ-20 are suggested.