The Depressive Experiences Questionnaire: a further evaluation.
The Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (DEQ; Blatt, D'Afflitti, & Quinlan, 1976b) was designed to assess the introjective and anaclitic personality dimensions hypothesized by Blatt (1974) to underlie different forms of depression. Welkowitz, Lish, and Bond (1985) revised the DEQ (RDEQ) in order to simplify its scoring and facilitate cross-gender comparisons. The study described herein explored the relation between the original and revised forms of the DEQ and assessed the reliability and validity of the Welkowitz et al. (1985) version of the inventory. Two samples were employed: (a) 163 psychiatric outpatients; and (b) 144 adolescent and young-adult offspring of patients with major affective disorders, chronic physical diseases, and normal controls. The results indicated that the three scales comprising the RDEQ were highly correlated with the corresponding scales from the original DEQ, however, the original and revised forms of the inventory exhibited different patterns of intercorrelations between scales. The RDEQ was internally consistent and stable over a 6-month period. In addition, it exhibited the predicted patterns of relationships with interview and self-report measures of depression and depressive personality traits and cognitive styles. Finally, the RDEQ was significantly associated with the course of depression in a 6-month follow-up study. The findings were generally similar across samples and genders. Overall, these results support the reliability and validity of the RDEQ, but indicate that there are important structural differences between the original and revised forms of the inventory.
Klein
D N
DN
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002138:Calibration / Q000592:standards; D003863:Depression / Q000523:psychology*; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic / Q000592:standards; D008297:Male; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000592:standards*; D011897:Random Allocation; D012016:Reference Values; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards