Psychometric properties of the Chinese Short Version of Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale in Chinese adults

Abstract

Objective To assess the reliability and validity of Chinese Short Version of Depression and Stress Scale(DASS-C21).Methods Totally 730 adults(≥18 years old) from 6 provinces completed 21-Item Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale(DASS-C21) and the reliability and validity of the scale were analyzed.Results For DASS-C21,the Cronbach's α was 0.912;the mean inter-item correlation coefficient was 0.338;the test-retest Pearson correlation coefficient was 0.751.For the three subscale,the Cronbach's α was from 0.754 to 0.823;the mean inter-item correlation coefficient was from 0.311 to 0.366;the test-retest Pearson correlation coefficient was from 0.663 to 0.705.The results of confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the three-factor structure of the DASS-C21 was very suitable for Chinese adults.Compared to the results of foreign researhes,the scores of three subscales among the mainland Chinese adults(n=730,depression=6.31±6.82,anxiety=6.95±6.60,stress=9.72±7.41)were significantly higher than those of the similar samples in England(P0.001)and Bahasa Malaysia(P0.001).However,a test of differnces in means between the mainland Chinese adults and Hong Kong-Chinese adults indicated that the depression subscale of Chinese adults was significantly higher than that of Hong Kong-Chinese(P0.01) and the stress subscale of mainland Chinese was significantly lower than that of Hong Kong-Chinese adults(P0.001),whereas there was no significant difference between the two samples for the anxiety subscale.Conclusion The Chinese Short Version of Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale is of acceptable psychometric properties and applicable among Chinese adults.