The structure of depression in alcoholic women

This study examines depression that is manifest at the time of an alcoholic woman's admission to treatment by describing indices of depression that were constructed by submitting interview items to factor analysis. Alcoholic women (N = 301) and nonalcoholic women (N = 137), who served as controls, responded to 48 depression items taken from several interview schedules, including the Diagnostic Interview Schedule, the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire. These 48 items were submitted to exploratory principal components analysis. Four factors, Current Mood, Low Self-Esteem, Negative Perceptions of Childhood and Somatic Symptoms emerged in the rotated solution, with coefficient alphas ranging from .83 to .92. Internal reliabilities for the depression indices remained sufficiently high across age and sample subgroups, suggesting that the structure of alcohol-induced depression in women does not differ from depression in nonalcoholic control women.