Does the SASSI command high credibility in the court?
Yes. One reason is the accuracy of the screening results (overall accuracy of 94%; 94% sensitivity and specificity). One important part of this credibility is that many other screening measures deliberately set their cutoff scores very low in order to maximize sensitivity of their instruments, often at the cost of misidentifying those without substance use disorders as test positive (i.e., low specificity). In contrast, one goal in developing the SASSI-3 decision rules was to balance the false positive and false negative error rates.
