Reliability and Validity of the BDI-II in High School Students

The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) is a revised version of the BDI and the BDI-IA. It was revised to be consistent with the DSM-IV criteria for evaluating the severity of depressive symptoms. The current study evaluates the reliability and validity estimates of the BDI-II. Participants included 114 boys and 101 girls from a high school population. The results from the reliability analysis showed that the alpha estimates for the BDI-II total scale scores were greater than .70 in the separate samples of boys (a = .87) and girls (a = .92). Evidence for concurrent validity was evaluated using the Pearson correlational analyses. Independent correlation analysis was carried out to examine the differences between boys and girls in terms of how the BDI-II total scores correlate with the positive-related measures and the negative-related measures. For the positive-related measures, significant group differences were obtained for one of the four measures. For the negative-related measures, significant group differences were obtained for three of the four measures