Content area

Abstract

Individuals abusing drugs and alcohol are driven by legal, social, and occupational reasons to “fake good” and obfuscate or deny their substance use in order to maintain their relationships, stay employed, and avoid legal consequences. Massive drug testing industries have been developed to detect substance use in the dishonest. However, the flip side of this issue has gotten little to no attention. There exists a small but significant number of individuals who do not abuse drugs or alcohol but “fake bad” to convince others that they do abuse illicit substances. This study sought to examine whether two robust psychological measures, the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) and the Inventory of Problems 29 (IOP-29) would be able to detect malingered substance use. Participants (N=47) were screened and assigned a role: honest substance use disorder (SUD) group (N=22) or feigning group (N=25). They were all then administered the IOP-29 and the PAI along with other measures, to validate if the IOP-29 and PAI were able to distinguish between honest respondents and feigning respondents. While the independent t-tests showed significant differences in malingering scales for the feigning and honest group, neither test was particularly effective at separating honest respondents from feigners. The IOP-29 had a 95% specificity rate and 64% sensitivity rate, and the PAI had a 100% specificity rate and a 52% sensitivity rate. Our analysis did not find that the IOP-29 and PAI were useful in differentiating honest SUD respondents versus feigning SUD respondents which may be contributed to sample characteristics, the fact the tests were not designed to look for substance abuse malingering, and the fact that malingered substance abuse is a novel and niche concept. Further research should continue to explore response patterns of those prompted to feign SUD’s and develop measures to detect malingered substance use.

Details

1010268
Title
Can the Inventory of Problems Detect Feigned Substance Use Disorders in Adults?
Number of pages
84
Publication year
2025
Degree date
2025
School code
1634
Source
DAI-A 87/6(E), Dissertation Abstracts International
ISBN
9798265463272
Committee member
Starin, Madeline
University/institution
Alliant International University
Department
San Diego, CSPP
University location
United States -- California
Degree
Psy.D.
Source type
Dissertation or Thesis
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
32397000
ProQuest document ID
3279179723
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/can-inventory-problems-detect-feigned-substance/docview/3279179723/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.
Database
ProQuest One Academic