Valid and reliable measures of craving are essential for both clinical practice and research. Brief measures are particularly valuable for clinical and research settings in which assessment burden needs to be minimized. The Craving Scale is a 3-item measure of craving that has been previously validated in cocaine-dependent samples. This brief measure has also demonstrated predictive validity in both alcohol and opioid use disorder; however, its psychometric properties in these disorders are not well characterized. The aim of this paper was to extend prior psychometric analyses of the Craving Scale to a large sample of adults seeking treatment for substance use disorders (N = 1,283). Analyses of readability indicated that the Craving Scale was written between a 7-8th grade reading level and had minimal grammatical complexity. The Craving Scale demonstrated strong internal consistency reliability (omega = 0.81), a single-factor latent structure, and adequate concurrent and discriminant validity. Importantly, results were similar when analyses were run separately for alcohol and opioid craving and in men and women, supporting measure invariance across these key groups. Our results provide further support for the reliability and validity of the Craving Scale for use in people with substance use disorders.

有效和可靠的渴望测量对于临床实践和研究都是必不可少的。简短的措施对于需要最小化评估负担的临床和研究环境特别有价值。渴望量表是一个 3 项的渴望量度，之前已在可卡因依赖样本中得到验证。这个简短的测量也证明了对酒精和阿片类药物使用障碍的预测有效性；然而，它在这些疾病中的心理测量特性没有得到很好的表征。本文的目的是将先前对渴望量表的心理测量分析扩展到大量寻求药物使用障碍治疗的成年人样本（N = 1,283)。可读性分析表明，渴望量表写在 7-8 年级阅读水平之间，语法复杂度最低。渴望量表显示出强大的内部一致性可靠性（欧米茄 = 0.81）、单因素潜在结构以及足够的同时和区分效度。重要的是，当对酒精和阿片类药物的渴望以及男性和女性分别进行分析时，结果相似，这支持了这些关键群体的测量不变性。我们的结果进一步支持了渴望量表在物质使用障碍患者中的​​可靠性和有效性。