Psychometric properties of the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory Revised in African Americans with and without obsessive-compulsive disorder

•African Americans tend to score higher on OCD self-report measures.•This study examines the OCI-R in African Americans with and without OCD.•Most OCI-R scales exhibited good to excellent internal consistency.•The OCI-R demonstrated good convergent and divergent validity.•ROC analysis indicates a cut-off score of 36 for African Americans.

Research has shown that many self-report measures of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are not valid for certain ethnoracial minority populations. It is important that OCD measures be validated cross-culturally before use in these groups. This study examines the psychometric properties of the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory Revised (OCI-R) in African Americans (N=148) to establish its validity in this population and determine clinically relevant cut-off scores. Clinical participants were administered the Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM-IV-TR, Yale–Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, and the Brown Assessment of Beliefs Scale. All participants were administered the Obsessive Belief Questionnaire – Brief Version, Beck Anxiety Inventory, and Beck Depression Inventory-II. Pearson correlations, t-tests, confirmatory factor analysis, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses were used to explore the relationship between measures and estimate the ability of the OCI-R to differentiate between individuals with and without OCD. Almost all scale scores exhibited acceptable to excellent internal consistency, and the OCI-R demonstrated good convergent and divergent validity. The originally proposed factor structure exhibited good to excellent fit. A cut-off score of 36 exhibited the optimal balance of sensitivity and specificity in African Americans, which is substantially greater than the score of 21 proposed in the original validation study.