Towards culture- and population-specific norms for self-reported depressive symptomatology

This paper: (1) reviewed and integrated the small body of cross-cultural literature on Zung SDS scores among college students and (2) reported new SDS data on students in four countries. Its purpose was to facilitate the development of population- and culture-specific norms for the measurement of depression and to identify patterns in the data available at this time. The results indicated considerable culture and gender specificity. Females had higher SDS scores in all but one group. There was a slight tendency for scores to increase over time. The pattern of mean scores across cultural groups was somewhat inconsistent. Korean and Philippine students had the highest scores, Caucasian Americans the lowest. There was moderate concordance of ranked symptoms across eleven samples. This concordance increased within cultural groups and especially within nations. Finally, two specific methodological problems were discussed. First, nine of ten of the highest ranked symptoms were stated in negative form, which suggests that negative wording biases symptom means. Second, there appear to be additional problems in the specific wording of the libido and diurnal variation items as applied to college students.