| Popis: |
Despite of wide utility in research and practice, It is important to determine whether racial/ethnic group differences in the CES-D reflect true differences in depressive symptoms or are instead due to measurement variance. The purpose of this study is to investigate overall psychometric properties of the CESD-20. 1,488 valid cases over 55 years from the Jackson Heart Study (JHS) were selected. With the Cronbach alphas and intra-factor correlation coefficients, both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses are used to identify the best factor structure and unique items’ loading patterns to each factor. When excluding reversed four items, alphas are significantly improved to .855 (total sample) & .872 (+ 55 ~ 65 older). Using the standard cutoff score of >16, 15.2% of sample would be moderately depressed, 4.6% (>25) might be diagnosed with severe depression with CESD-20 item scale. The CFA found that both 3-factor and 4-factor models are well fitted with overall fit indices (e.g., CFI= .95, SRMR = .043~.050). This study found that the CESD has relatively less solid psychometric properties when used with older African Americans due to problematic reverse-score items and irrelevance of interpersonal construct. Researchers should be aware that to simply measure the variance between aggregate scores of racial/ethnic groups does not provide the most valid data to analyze differences between those groups because of guarded expression of depression among older African Americans. |
