Depression Rating Scales in Research

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[Ollie123]

The BDI might be a little weird since you aren't dealing with a clinical population, which is really what its for. A common mistake many researchers make is to use it for diagnostic purposes (drives me crazy when I see that!). Its meant to measure depression severity among depressed individuals. I don't know the area so I'm not sure to what extent an androgen-induced depression might differ from typical MDD. As long as your interests are entirely in the presence or absence of symptoms and not in whether they meet some kind of clinical threshold, the BDI is probably a good choice.

Have relatively little experience with the Hamilton, but I've heard good things about that one as well.

Only other one I've used is the CES-D, which I hate with a fiery passion. Soooooooooo many false positives. We used it as a screening measure with one study (because the IRB insisted...don't ask). Its just very sensitive to response styles and what we got seemed to be much more reflective of how the individual tended to respond rather than the presence of any actual symptoms. I think eventually we ended up finding some obscure study that had changed the scale headings on it that we could use as an excuse to change ours so we could stop excluding perfectly healthy individuals who were flagged as depressed.

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

The HAMD (Hamilton Rating Scales for Depression) is quite popular for pharmaceutical research. In psychology research it tends to be something like the BDI (Beck Depression Inventory). I'm not wild about the HAMD, but it is better than some other stuff out there.

 

[Cosmo75]

I do a lot of medical research also. We use the HADS quite often. I used the Brief Symptom Inventory - 18 for my dissertation, which gives you anxiety, depression and somatization.

 

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[Messipsych]

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[Neuro-Dr]

You will need to look at test/re-test reliability very closely with all of these measures. There is a fair amount of data questioning the utility of these measures in a change over time design. The rates for the BDI are around .66, which is aweful and not improved much when done by therapist versus patients.

 

[biogirl215]

Lots of people here use the Center for Epidemiology Depression scale for non-clinical populations.