Consistency and reliability of the auditory vocal hallucination rating scale (AVHRS).

Dear Editor Assessing characteristics of auditory vocal hallucinations (AVH) is a key issue in psychiatric clinical practice and research. Recently, a review of assessment tools for AVH has been published (Ratcliff et al. 2011), describing two structured interviews and eight selfreport instruments. Meanwhile, the auditory vocal hallucinations rating scale (AVHRS) (Jenner & Van de Willige, 2002) developed since 1996 has been used in adolescent and adult patient research (Van de Willige et al. 1996; Jenner & Van de Willige, 2001) and in research on non-clinical children (Bartels-Velthuis et al. 2010, 2011, 2012). We examined the consistency, the inter-rater reliability and the discriminative power of the AVHRS.