Measuring Depressive Symptomatology in a General Population

The Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS): psychometric properties

“…This association with gender has been previously reported for the BDI (Beck et al 1988). The negative correlations of the HRS-D, BDI and IDS-C (28-item) with education is also consistent with other reports (Beck, 1967;Beck & Beamsderfer, 1974;Blumenthal, 1975;Dorus & Senay, 1980;Oliver & Simmons, 1984), which support the conclusion that these associations may be characteristics of the population studied rather than flaws in a specific instrument.…”

Depression in geriatric and adult medical inpatients

“…It is possible that different factors determine depression in the two sexes (Murrel et al, 1983). Another result that is in agreement with previous studies is the inverse relationship between depression and social class (Comstock & Helsing, 1976;Frerichs et al, 1981;Warheit et al, 1974). This emerges clearly in the adult population; in the elderly subjects, the general predominance of lower social class, given that for most of the subjects the State pension (very low in Italy), constitutes their only income.…”

The effect of level of depression on the use of visual analogue scales by normal volunteers.

“…There was a small age difference between HD and LD subjects in Study 1 but this is very unlikely to be of biological significance, particularly as differential usage of the visual analogue scales was clearly seen in Study 2 where no age differences existed. Our screening instrument, the Zung SDS, has been used in population surveys and the distribution of scores found in our study are similar to those reported by other workers (Blumenthal, 1975;Barrett et al, 1978). Our HD groups had scores which, although high in relation to our total volunteer population, are below the level which would normally result in referral for medical treatment.…”