How well can a few questionnaire items indicate anxiety and depression?
There is a need for a short form questionnaire with known psychometric characteristics that may be used as an indicator of level of global mental distress. A weighted sum of 5 questions from the Symptom Check List (SCL) anxiety and depression subscales (SCL-25) correlates at r = 0.92 with the global SCL-25 score. The alpha reliability for the (5-item) short form questionnaire was 0.85%. Age differences seemed to be trivial, and sex differences were moderate. Descriptive statistics for short form scores in a large, representative sample are given.
Department of Epidemiology, University of Oslo, Norway.
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D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D015331:Cohort Studies; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000592:standards*; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires