Abstract
The elderly population has extensively increased globally, so depression like a common problem in late life may convert to one of the economic, social, and health challenges of the 21st century. Due to the high cost of clinical diagnosis of depression, it is necessary to provide effective questionnaires like the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15) for screening. But, the measurement invariance of GDS-15 is still unknown in the general population. In our study, 1473 participants of all Iran’s ethnic groups were asked to answer GDS-15 and demographic factors such as human settlements, employment, disease, marital status, age, gender, homebound, financial status, and ethnicity. Then, the lordif package in R 3.1.3 was used to assess differential item functioning (DIF) items that behave unevenly across demographic factors. Our findings reveal that women, homebound patients, poorer, and non-Persian mother tongue score classic psychological symptoms higher than peoples of the same depression score in other groups. Since, psychologists have to remove or replace these items before using this questionnaire for screening geriatric depression.
Highlights
I n late life, depression is one of the reversible disorders that increased healthcare expenses and decreased quality of life [1]
If the latent variable of Item Response Theory (IRT) models were substituted at the ability of OLR models, the logistic regression analysis could overlook this potential limit of ability parameters on Differential item functioning (DIF) detection
Interpretation of Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) item scores across different group memberships was compared in four studies: Chinese pneumoconiosis workers, homebound patients in New York, a large longitudinal in old age Italian, and [18, 34, 35]
Summary
I n late life, depression is one of the reversible disorders that increased healthcare expenses and decreased quality of life [1]. Since population dynamic is one of the most important factors to determine health care needed in society, the growing trend of the elderly population can convert depression into one of the economic, social, and health challenges of the 21st century [4, 5]. To prevent this problem, we should investigate methods for prompt recognition of this illness. The 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15), which has 92% sensitivity and 89% specificity, is one of the most popular instruments to meet these expectations [7, 8] It had acceptable validity and reliability in clinical practice and research [9e11]
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