Assessing the Stability of Depression in College Students

Two different approaches are used to assess the one-month stability of depressive affect in college students. First, a high retest correlation is demonstrated for a latent depressive affect construct using self-reports from the previous month on the Beck Depression Inventory, the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale, and Zung's Self-Rating Depression Scale. This is true although the corresponding stabilities for individual scales are only moderate. Second, the predictive validity of depressive categorization based on these scales is examined using logistic regression techniques. Depressive categorizations are best predicted from the corresponding depressive categorization on the same scale at Time 1. There is little additional across-scale predictive information in the assessment of depressive categorization; this again suggests that a single factor model is most appropriate. Further, the association between assessments of dysphoric affect over one month in college students is less than previously established longitudinal associations between dysphoric affect categorizations over one year in older adult samples. This suggests that college students may be more affectively volatile than adults.