Concurrent Validity of the Clinical Assessment of Depression with the Beck Depression Inventory-Second Edition

Depression is a disorder that can affect every aspect of one\u27s life, ranging from physical health issues to interpersonal relationship difficulties. Therefore, it is imperative that the depressive symptoms of college students be identified, evaluated, and treated. Self-report measures are a common technique to identify depressive symptomatology in individuals and assist in diagnosis and treatment. Existing measures are often used as a criterion by which to validate the psychometric properties and effectiveness of newly designed, self-report measures. The purpose of this investigation was to explore the concurrent validity of a newly published self-report measure of depression, the Clinical Assessment of Depression (CAD; Bracken & Howell, 2004) with an existing measure, the Beck Depression Inventory-Second Edition (BDI-II; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996). The sample used for this investigation consisted of 125 college students (38 males and 87 females) ranging in age from 18 to 52 years. Internal consistencies for the sample were computed for the BDI-II and the CAD and were found to be in the acceptable range with computed coefficient alphas from r - .87 to .97. Significant, moderate to strong positive correlations were found between the CAD total score and the CAD subscales with the BDI-II total score and ranged from .55 to .97. This study also investigated gender differences on both measures. Independent f-tests were computed and found no significant difference between male and female mean scores on either the CAD or the BDI-II. Classification consistency between the CAD diagnosis of depression and the BDI-II diagnosis of depression using the BDI-II as the criterion was 82%. The measures have high consistency when identifying individuals as falling within a clinically significant diagnostic category of depression. Overall, results indicate that the CAD is a valid measure of depressive symptomatology in college students