Objective – Aim of the study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Drug Attitude Inventory (DAI) by exploring its construct validity. Setting – 90 voluntary admitted patients with DSM III-R Schizophrenic (n.72) and Schizoaffective (n.18) disorders, age range between 18 and 50 years, treated with typical antipsychotics, able to participate in the study, were selected. Design – Exploratory factor analyses with alpha factoring and maximum–likelihood methods with Varimax Rotation were used to analyse DAI scores. Results – Extraction methods found 7 factors which explained 62.5% of the total variance. The first 2 factors could be labelled as “subjective response to treatment” construct and factors 3 to 7 as “attitude to medication” contruct. Conclusion – Although preliminarily, the Italian version of the DAI seems to maintain the original psychometric properties and it can be used easily to get a valid measurement of the patients' attitude to neuroleptic medication.
