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open access
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E-ISSN : 2733-4538
The validity and reliability of the Korean-Dementia Rating Scale (K-DRS) have been examined. 143 normal elderlies and 20 patients diagnosed with the dementia of the Alzheimer's type(DAT) participated in the study. Three approaches were pursued to examine the different aspects of validity. First approach focused on the content validity of the K-DRS. Efforts were made to ensure that the translated tasks would be tapping the same cognitive processes that were purported to be examined in the original Dementia Rating Scale (Mattis, 1988). Secondly, we employed an empirical approach to establish the construct and criterion validity of the test. Correlation between the total scores of the K-DRS and the MMSEK(Kwon & Park, 1989) was sought for the construct validity, which yielded a correlation coefficient of .82. Criterion validity with diagnostic states as the criterion was examined. The correlation between the diagnoses and the K-DRS total scores was .66 when all participants were included in the group. The correlations increased when the normative group was divided by age and years of education, except for one subgroup. The third approach involved examining how well each subtest discriminated the DAT, which showed that Memory and Initiation contributed significantly. It was concluded that K-DRS is a valid dementia assessment tool in terms of its content, construct and criterion validities. Test-retest reliability of two weeks was examined by testing 20 normal elderly adults and 11 DAT patients, yielding .96. Inter-rater reliability involving three raters was .99.