A psychometric view on the applicability of the BDI-II in non-clinical populations

Abstract

The revised version of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) is a broadly used instrument for assessing the severity of depression of adolescents of at least 13 years of age and adults. The self-assessment questionnaire contains 21 polytomous items and follows the criteria for a major depression specified in the DSM-IV. Clinical samples have often been used to analyze the psychometric properties of the instrument primarily with factor analytic methods. The present study performs a psychometric analysis in a non-clinical sample in order to ascertain, whether the instrument performs equally well with the different kinds of samples. A clinical sample and a sample of students filled in the questionnaire. A partial credit model was applied and parameter estimates and model fit of the two samples were compared. Threshold parameters and model fit largely agreed, however some items exhibited characteristic deviations. Nevertheless, person parameter estimates notably agreed in both samples. These results indicate that the BDI-II performs in clinical and non-clinical samples comparably well, only some items show characteristic deviations in the non-clinical sample.