THE purpose of this pilot study is to develop a simple, easily administered screening instrument to select from a large population of pregnant women who register for prenatal care those who have a known probability of being diagnosable as schizophrenic. The instrument will be used to aid in selection of families where one or both parents are schizophrenic for a longitudinal study of infants at high risk for schizophrenia.
A considerable number of instruments have been developed for the assessment of personality and of mental disorder. From the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), subsets of scale 8 were selected to discriminate schizophrenia. They were, however, largely unsuccessful (Dahlstrom and Walsh1 (p284) ). Dahlstrom and Wohler2 applied discriminant function analysis to the problem and developed optimal weights for ten basic clinical scales. Other instruments that have been utilized for psychiatric appraisal include the Cornell Medical Index-Health Questionnaire (Brodman et