Scientific background: ASRS (Adult ADHD)
About this test
The ASRS was developed in 2005 by a WHO working group together with Ronald C. Kessler (Harvard Medical School) and colleagues, and is one of the most widely used screening instruments internationally for adult ADHD. The full version has 18 items; the six items used here ("Part A") were identified in the original study as the most statistically informative of all 18, and are validated as a standalone brief screener. Importantly: this questionnaire checks for current symptoms, but doesn't replace the evidence, required for an ADHD diagnosis, that similar difficulties were already present in childhood.
In the development sample, the six-item short screener reached a specificity of 99.5% at moderate sensitivity of 68.7% using a threshold of 4 or more elevated answers -- meaning the test misses a meaningful share of true cases, but very rarely produces a false positive. Adler and colleagues (2006) report good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha of approximately .88). Validation studies of the successor instrument, the ASRS-5, find comparable reliability but a different sensitivity-specificity balance depending on language and sample -- a reminder that these numbers can shift somewhat depending on the population studied.
Dimensions
ADHD Screener (Part A)
Number of items where your answer counts as elevated per the official scoring key (0–6). For the first three items, "Sometimes" or higher already counts; for the last three items, only "Often" or "Very Often" counts -- exactly the WHO's original scoring pattern.
Sources & license
Kessler, R. C., Adler, L., Ames, M., Demler, O., Faraone, S., Hiripi, E., Howes, M. J., Jin, R., Secnik, K., Spencer, T., Ustun, T. B., & Walters, E. E. (2005). The World Health Organization Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS): A short screening scale for use in the general population. Psychological Medicine, 35(2), 245–256.
ASRS-v1.1 Screener © 2003 World Health Organization (WHO). The 6-question short version ("Part A") is widely distributed by WHO for individual self-screening use with a WHO copyright notice, as reflected here; the full 18-question checklist requires separate permission and was deliberately not implemented, matching the German site. Item wording, response-scale anchors, and the official scoring pattern were verified verbatim against the official WHO/CADDRA-hosted ASRS-v1.1 form.
https://www.caddra.ca/wp-content/uploads/ASRS.pdfAdler, L. A., Spencer, T., Faraone, S. V., Kessler, R. C., Howes, M. J., Biederman, J., & Secnik, K. (2006). Validity of pilot Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) to rate adult ADHD symptoms. Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, 18(3), 145–148.
Scientific publication, cited as evidence for internal consistency and inter-rater agreement.
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