Authors

Richard Rogers, PhD, ABPP; Professional Manual by Richard Rogers, PhD, ABPP, Kenneth W. Sewell, PhD, and Nathan D. Gillard, MS

Description 

While retaining many of the features that made the original instrument the gold standard in its field, the updated SIRS-2 helps evaluate feigning of psychiatric symptoms in greater detail with expanded scoring and classification.

The SIRS-2 was developed to assess deliberate distortions in the self-report of symptoms. Each scale produces useful information on how a particular client may distort or fabricate his or her symptoms. The primary focus of the SIRS-2 is on the evaluation of feigning and the manner in which it is likely to occur, such as an exaggeration of symptom severity rather than a fabrication of symptomatology.

The revised Manual updates the malingering literature with special attention to detection strategies and their clinical applications to feigned mental disorders. It combines data from the original SIRS validation studies with more recent research and includes a conceptual framework for understanding feigned mental disorders plus explicit instructions for administration, scoring and classification. The SIRS-2 Manual also provides clarifications of malingering, factitious disorders, feigning, and related terms; an understanding of explanatory models and their relevance to clinical practice; a conceptualisation of detection strategies within different domains; and insights into the SIRS-2 primary scales, including their general category of detection strategies (unlikely vs. amplified) and conceptual relationship to other commonly used measures.

The updated Interview Booklet contains test questions and their ratings. Two security templates are provided for those instances in which evaluators are legally required to produce the SIRS-2 responses to each item. A Spanish Language Interview Booklet is also available.

The SIRS was designed for the assessment of feigning, including a scale to assess defensiveness; the content of each scale varies so that endorsement of items on a particular scale does not reflect any specific mental disorder. The SIRS-2 adds additional scales and indexes to more thoroughly evaluate client responses.
The 16-page Interview Booklet contains 172 items, 32 of which are Repeated Inquiries to detect inconsistency of responding. The content covers a wide range of psychopathology, as well as symptoms that are unlikely to be true.
The SIRS-2 is designed to detect response styles commonly associated with feigning and allows for classification as feigning (definite or probable) or genuine responding, as well as identification of inconsistent and other problematic response styles that have implications for therapeutic dynamics and other treatment considerations.
The wealth of empirical support established for the measure gives users confidence in the validity of the SIRS-2 for forensic populations. This is particularly important as findings of psychological evaluations are often closely scrutinised during court proceedings. In particular, the SIRS-2 demonstrates excellent discriminant validity when comparing feigning versus genuine samples.

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