[Psychometric properties of DASS-42 as assessed in a sample of Kermanshah high school students]

ABSTRACT

Psychological scales are increasingly used as important tools for assessment of intelligence, talents, academic achievement and personality characteristics and as a help in diagnosis of mental or personality disorders. Besides other methods of studying behaviors, these tools can be used for such purposes in schools, industrial and commercial organizations, public offices, universities and medical centers. This study aimed to assess psychometric properties of Depression-Anxiety-Stress Scale [DASS-42] in a sample of high school students in Kermanshah. This was a psychometric study executed on Kermanshah high school students in 2003-2004 academic year. A total number of 400 students were selected through multi-stage cluster sampling. In addition to DASS-44, other scales used in this study include Beck Depression Inventory [BDI], Zung Anxiety Scale [ZAS] and Studets' Stress Scale [SSS].Data were analysed running SPSS-10 software. The depression subscale of DASS-42 showed a high correlation [0.849] with the BDI in a 0.01 level of statistical significance. The stress subscale of DASS-42 was also found to have a 0.757 correlation co-efficient with SSS, again statistically significant at a 0.01 level. The rates of Chronbach alpha for the depression, anxiety and Stress subscales of DASS-42 were found to be 0.94, 0.85 and 0.87 respectively. The KMO rate for the present study was 0.88 which indicates a large-enough sample size for factor analysis. The Cruet-Bartlett's test also showed a chi-square rate of 0.794 with a degree of freedom equal to 861, which was again significant at a 0.01 alpha level. After factor analysis, the factors which showed high specificity measures were compared with those introduced by the original authors. Hence this study identified a three factor model which can be regarded as identical with the model introduced by the original authors