Validating Measures of Depressive Severity

摘要

Santor, Gregor, and Welch (this issue) report that new measures of depressive severity have been introduced at a fairly steady pace since the 1960s and that more than 280 such measures have been published since 1918. Their analyses indicate that the measures of depressive severity differ in their content (particularly the symptom domains included and numbers of items in different domains), response format, target populations, and intended uses. Their analyses also indicate that relatively few of these scales are regularly used in practice. Most of the depressive severity measures seem to have been introduced in the context of basic research and are not used in clinical studies, which have generally relied on about five measures, all of which were developed more than 20 years ago.