Publication Date

2004

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Dr. Elizabeth L. Jones (Director), Dr. Carl Myers, Dr. Reagan Brown

Degree Program

Department of Psychology

Degree Type

Specialist in Education

Abstract

Depression in adolescents if unrecognized, can interfere with every aspect of the individual’s life, increasing the risk for illness and interpersonal difficulties in the future. Therefore, it is imperative that significant levels of depressive symptoms be recognized, assessed, and treated. The usefulness and psychometric properties of new measures of depression are determined, in part, through comparison with existing measures. The current study investigated the concurrent validity of the Clinical Assessment of Depression (CAD; Bracken & Howell, 2004) with the Beck Depression Inventory-Second Edition (BDI-II; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) for an adolescent population. The sample for this investigation consisted of 23 adolescents (13-18 years) with a primary diagnosis of unipolar depression and 98 adolescents that did not have a clinical diagnosis. Correlation coefficients were large and statistically significant between the CAD and BDI-II, ranging from .97 to .66. The CAD was able to distinguish between clinical and non-referred groups on the basis of mean group scores. Using the BDI-II classification as the criterion, a contingency table was computed and a classification consistency of 82% for the total sample was found. Findings of the current study indicate that the CAD appears to have adequate validity to support its use with adolescents.

Disciplines

Child Psychology | Psychology

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