Author's reply to: Comment on "Web-based measure of life events using Computerized Life Events and Assessment Record (CLEAR): preliminary cross-sectional study of reliability, validity, and association with depression": validity and methodological issues

I thank the editors of JMIR Mental Health for the opportunity to respond to the Letter to the Editor [1] critiquing the methodology of the Computerised Online Life events Record (CLEAR) [2] published in this journal. While appreciating the critique, it expands on only one of the validity findings, comparing CLEAR with a life event interview and checklist questionnaire. There are significant points not outlined in the letter [1] and these are addressed here. Without questioning the additional statistical analyses provided by the sensitivity and specificity, the conclusion that this is unacceptable for a “diagnostic tool” is refuted. CLEAR is not a clinical diagnostic tool but owing to its high predictive validity with regard to depression and superiority to the checklist life events test (LTE-Q) [3], it retains value as a method for identifying environmental stressors related to clinical models.

©Antonia Bifulco. Originally published in JMIR Mental Health (http://mental.jmir.org), 21.05.2020. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Mental Health, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://mental.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.