ASRS (Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale): questions, scoring and accuracy

The six screener questions

Each question asks how often something has happened over the past six months, with five answers: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often and Very Often. On the official form, some answer boxes are shaded. Those are the ones that count.

Question	Counts if you answer
1. How often do you have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project, once the challenging parts have been done?	Sometimes, Often or Very Often
2. How often do you have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization?	Sometimes, Often or Very Often
3. How often do you have problems remembering appointments or obligations?	Sometimes, Often or Very Often
4. When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started?	Often or Very Often
5. How often do you fidget or squirm with your hands or feet when you have to sit down for a long time?	Often or Very Often
6. How often do you feel overly active and compelled to do things, like you were driven by a motor?	Often or Very Often

Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS v1.1) Screener. Copyright © New York University and President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Reproduced without alteration. 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). Psychological Medicine, 35(2), 245-256. Neurodivergent Clinic is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the World Health Organization, Harvard or New York University.

Questions 1 to 4 are about inattention and organisation. Questions 5 and 6 are about restlessness and hyperactivity. Note that the bar is lower for the first three questions: they count from “Sometimes”.

How accurate the ASRS is

The 2005 study that developed the ASRS checked it against clinical interviews. The six-question screener did better than the full 18 questions:

Measure	6-question screener	18-question version
Sensitivity (people with ADHD it picked up)	68.7%	56.3%
Specificity (people without ADHD it correctly cleared)	99.5%	98.3%
Overall accuracy	97.9%	96.2%

A 2007 study of 668 members of a large US health plan found the screener agreed strongly with clinician diagnoses, with an area under the curve of 0.90 (1.0 would be perfect, 0.5 no better than chance).

Three things to keep in mind:

• It misses people. A sensitivity of 68.7% means about three in ten adults who had ADHD screened negative.
• The high overall accuracy partly reflects the setting. Most people in a general population sample do not have ADHD, and a test that rarely says “yes” will be right about most of them.
• Other conditions can push scores up. Depression, anxiety and poor sleep all affect attention and organisation, so they can produce the same answers.

Where the ASRS fits in an ADHD assessment

A questionnaire is where an ADHD assessment starts, not where it ends. Healthdirect summarises the criteria a diagnosis has to meet: symptoms lasting more than six months, present before age 12, causing real problems in at least two settings, and interfering with daily life. Australia’s ADHD guideline says the assessment should draw on information about more than one setting and from more than one person.

So a formal assessment usually adds a clinical interview against the diagnostic criteria, a developmental history (ideally with someone who knew you as a child), longer rating scales, and checks for the conditions that look like ADHD. In Australia, ADHD can be diagnosed by a psychologist, psychiatrist or paediatrician; who can prescribe medication depends on your state.

Take the free ASRS screener · How an ADHD assessment works

Questions people ask

What does ASRS stand for?

Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale. Version 1.1 was developed with the World Health Organization and published in 2005. You may also see it called the WHO ASRS.

Can the ASRS diagnose ADHD?

No. It is a screening questionnaire. A positive result means a full assessment is worth doing; a diagnosis needs a clinical interview, a developmental history and a clinician ruling out other explanations.

What is a positive ASRS score?

On the six-question screener, four or more answers in the shaded range is a positive screen. The shaded range is “Sometimes” or more often for questions 1 to 3, and “Often” or more often for questions 4 to 6.

How accurate is the ASRS?

In the 2005 study that developed it, the six-question screener picked up 68.7% of adults with ADHD and correctly cleared 99.5% of those without it. It misses about three in ten people with ADHD, so a negative screen does not rule it out.

What is the difference between the ASRS v1.1 and the ASRS-5?

The ASRS v1.1 (2005) is based on the older DSM-IV criteria. The ASRS-5 was published in 2017 to match DSM-5. The six-question v1.1 screener is free to use; the ASRS-5 needs permission from the copyright holders.

Can I take the ASRS online for free?

Yes. Our free ADHD test uses the six-question ASRS v1.1 screener, unaltered and scored the official way. The result shows on the page and nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to send it to a clinician.