Original articlePsychometric Evaluation of the Rasch-Based Depression Screening in Patients With Neurologic Disorders
Section snippets
Methods
The DESC was completed by 323 consecutive inpatients at admission to the neurologic department of a German university hospital. All participants were white. The mean age ± SD of the participants was 53.4±17.2 years; 49.3% were women. The mean length of stay in the hospital ± SD was 9.5±5.3 days (table 1).
Participants took part voluntarily without payment and signed an informed consent prior to testing. Test administration was conducted by trained personnel. The study was approved by the local
Separation and Reliability
Both versions of the DESC showed good item separation (DESC-I=4.96; DESC-II=4.94) and person separation (DESC-I=2.01; DESC-II=2.14) as well as item reliability (DESC-I=.96; DESC-II=.96) and person reliability (DESC-I=.80; DESC-II=.82).
Rasch Model Fit
All items of both DESC versions fit the Rasch model according to both infit and outfit mean squares statistics (see table 2). The spread of item category thresholds ranged from –3.48 to 2.35 logits for DESC-I and from –3.52 to 2.73 logits for DESC-II.
Unidimensionality and Local Independence
The principal
Discussion
This study aimed at providing a first evaluation of the DESC in consecutive inpatients with neurologic disorders. Overall, we found good Rasch model fit according to infit and outfit mean squares and indicators for unidimensionality and local independence of both parallel rating scales. Parallel test reliability was very good, and classifications of patients into depressed versus nondepressed were concordant between the 2 forms of the DESC. This indicates that the 2 versions of the instrument
Conclusions
Although future studies are needed to validate the DESC further in patients with neurologic disorders, the promising results of the present study suggest high psychometric quality of the instrument in this population.
Acknowledgments
We thank the staff of the neurologic hospital of the RWTH Aachen University for their support in conducting the present study.
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Supported by the START-program of the Faculty of Medicine (grant no. 690812), RWTH Aachen, and the German Research Foundation (grant no. DFG, WI3210/2-1).
No commercial party having a direct financial interest in the results of the research supporting this article has or will confer a benefit on the authors or on any organization with which the authors are associated.