Abstract
The Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS) is widely used as a screening measure for psychological distress. Nevertheless, there is disagreement among researchers about the extent to which the HADS provides separate measures of anxiety and depression or a single measure of affectively based distress, and the present study was designed to contribute to this discussion. Participants (n = 951) who were psychologically distressed, but not hospitalized, completed a Polish language version of the HADS. A confirmatory factor analysis of participants’ responses confirmed a model with two correlated factors with one cross-loaded item. The estimated correlation between the factors was .68. These results suggest that the Polish version of the HADS consists of two correlated measures of affectively focused distress, depression and anxiety. Nevertheless, analysts and practitioners need to be cautious and take into account the possibility that the discriminant validity of these two scales may be somewhat limited given the correlation between the subscales and the possible cross-loadings of items.
Highlights
The Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS) is widely used as a screening measure for psychological distress
The current results suggest that the HADS distinguishes anxiety and depression, and by extension, the present results suggest that the Polish language version of the HADS may serve as a convenient screening tool to measure psychological distress in Poles
The only cross-sectional epidemiological study of mental problems in Poland of which we are aware (EZOP, Kiejna et al 2015) described implausibly low rates of the prevalence of depression and anxiety disorders among Poles, in comparison other European countries. Such findings call for additional assessment of the prevalence of depression and anxiety in Poland, and we believe that HADS can be a good candidate for the preliminary selection of psychologically distress individuals and who might meet diagnostic criteria for a disorder
Summary
The Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS) is widely used as a screening measure for psychological distress. The estimated correlation between the factors was .68 These results suggest that the Polish version of the HADS consists of two correlated measures of affectively focused distress, depression and anxiety. The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) was developed by Zigmond and Snaith (1983) as a means of determining if an individual is experiencing psychological distress defined in terms of the two most common types of distress, depression and anxiety. The scale has fourteen items, seven meant to measure depression and seven meant to measure anxiety, and scores on the scale were intended to provide a quick and efficient method of determining patients’ mental health in terms of these two common emotional disorders. The HADS has been widely used in populations with somatic complaints (Cosco et al 2012), several normalization studies have been conducted in individuals with major depression symptoms (Mykletun et al 2001; Flint and Rifat 1996; Friedman et al 2001; Hansson et al 2008; Matsudaira et al 2009) and in non-clinical populations (Mykletun et al 2001; Andrea et al 2004)
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