Anxiety, depression and coping strategies in adolescence: psychometric issues and proposal of a reduced version

ABSTRACT

This study used depression (CDI – Kovacs, 1981), anxiety (MASC – March, 1997) and coping strategy (CRI-Y – Moos, 1993) scales and studied the fitness of reduced versions. The sample consisted of 916 Portuguese pupils, 54.3% fiinine, aged 10 to 21 years old. The participants were randomly selected from public schools nation-wide. Two classes were chosen from the 5th to the 12th grade.A set of principal component analyses was carried out in a randomly chosen sample (n = 394) and three reduced measures were found to be strongly correlated with the previous. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) using the other part of the sample (n = 522) revealed adjustment indexes suggesting a good fit for both the whole model and gender and age groups separately. All scales revealed a good internal consistency. According to our results, girls were more anxious and developed more coping strategies than boys. Older students tended to be less depressed, while younger adolescents present higher scores in CDI-R (depression) and CRI-R (coping) scales(AU)