Development of an Indigenous Depression Scale for Adolescent Schoolgirls

Depressive symptoms in adolescence are a risk factor for psychiatric disturbances in adulthood. Therefore, the assessment of early signs of depression in adolescent schoolgirls was undertaken that entailed three phases. In the first phase, 87 schoolgirls were interviewed and 40 items related to depression were obtained.These were judged for its content validity by experts in second phase. In the third phase, these extracted items were administered on schoolgirls (N = 500) along with Children Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 2007). Factor analysis revealed three main factors, i.e., Loneliness, Irritability, and Anxiety. The sensitivity and specificity index of the scale also appeared to be promising. The results demonstrated high internal consistency (.88) of this scale. The scale had moderate correlation (.68) with Children Depression Inventory.