Performance of the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale for caregiving research

The Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CESD) scale has been useful in a broad spectrum of health research on patient and population outcomes. A brief version is used when depressive symptoms are not the primary focus. Rasch (item response) analysis previously demonstrated potential problems with positively worded items. We tested the 10-item CESD (CESD-10) scale and considered an 8-item version with both psychometric and Rasch analyses.

This was a special sample of 2067 caregivers from three existing US databases. We describe item response patterns and internal constancy in addition to Rasch scale results.

There were few problems with missing data, and internal consistency was high (alpha = 0.86-0.88) for both CESD versions. Rasch analysis indicated that one of the positive items ("hopeful about future") could be dropped.

We partly confirmed prior work that suggested dropping positive items for the CESD-10. Among caregivers, item-level problems and scaling problems seem minimal. At present, there is not a strong rationale for dropping the CESD-10 positive items: the one poorly performing positive item might be explained by the special caregiver sample.