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Depression anxiety stress scale: is it valid for children and adolescents?
Author(s) -
Patrick Jeff,
Dyck Murray,
Bramston Paul
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.124
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1097-4679
pISSN - 0021-9762
DOI - 10.1002/jclp.20696
Subject(s) - psychology , anxiety , clinical psychology , stress (linguistics) , depression (economics) , scale (ratio) , developmental psychology , psychiatry , physics , quantum mechanics , economics , macroeconomics , linguistics , philosophy
The Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995) is used to assess the severity of symptoms in child and adolescent samples although its validity in these populations has not been demonstrated. The authors assessed the latent structure of the 21‐item version of the scale in samples of 425 and 285 children and adolescents on two occasions, one year apart. On each occasion, parallel analyses suggested that only one component should be extracted, indicating that the test does not differentiate depression, anxiety, and stress in children and adolescents. The results provide additional evidence that adult models of depression do not describe the experience of depression in children and adolescents. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: 66:1–12, 2010.