The Preliminary Preparation Of Subliminal Depression Scale

Background:Subthreshold depression is a clinical manifestation between health and depression. Studies have shown that subthreshold depression has higher prevalence in the population, but often occurs misdiagnosed or missed phenomenon owing to mild symptoms and low attention. Subthreshold depression has not yet reached the diagnostic criteria of depression, but it will also damage physical and mental health and reduce the quality of life. If we could not be earlier propaganda, earlier monitor, earlier detection, it would lead the depression manifestation to be sustained, chronic and recurrent episodes, which exists a high risk of developing depression. Therefore, the identification of subthreshold depression has attracted wide attention from scholars.The existing research is no specific assessment tools with the identification of subthreshold depression. The measures of subthreshold depression, mainly by means of self-rating depression scale or other depression scale, have a disadvantage on assessing subthreshold depression which because depression scales were high severity on the design of dimension and language use. Further stated that most depression scales were from the West and lack of oriental culture elements. Therefore, this study suggests that it would be very necessary to develop subthreshold depression scale with the characteristics of the Chinese people, and provide a high reliability and validity assessment tool for the population of subthreshold depression, and enrich and expand the research for mental Sub-health and psychometrics.Objective:(1) Develop subthreshold depression scale;(2) Examine the reliability and validity for self-development subthreshold depression scale.Methods:This study, based on psychometric theory, constructs the theoretical foundation of subthreshold depression by literature research, interviews, expert advice and other methods; This study, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine sophomore college students as subjects, sends subthreshold depression scale to pre-experiment which select the object to be measured at 130 persons by the cluster sampling method; The study select a total of 320 people with all sophomores from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine in the west campus to inspect the reliability and validity of self-development subthreshold depression scale.Results:(1) 80% of the the panel members agreed that:subthreshold depression means the main systems which include depression mood or declining interest, and cause mild social dysfunction. Part of the population show the systems accompanied by physical symptoms and symptoms of low self-concept, which show manifestations of depressive symptoms for the most of the time every day for a month. Subthreshold depression scale contains four dimensions, which namely are depression mood, social dysfunction, physiological dysfunction, low self-concept. Subthreshold depression scale forms 43 projects eventually, which include 10 depression mood,15 social dysfunction,10 physiological dysfunction and 8 self-concept.(2) The project analysis found that the seven project, which contained n7, n14,n15,n16,n19,n29 and n30, were deleted because of poor discrimination and being not meeting the criterion standard of the project analysis. The discrimination and discrimination of the remaining 36 projects were very well. The factor analysis showed that:subthreshold depression scale and ultimately the formation of the four factors, the four factors explained the 62.603% of the total variance, and the maximum load of the projects was 0.819, and the minimum load of the projects was 0.46. In the factor analysis, the seven project,which included n1l, n18, n21, n22, n28, n31 and n32, were advised to delete on account of literature review, interviews with experts, analyzing the content of the seven items and not satisfying the conditions of the factor analysis.(3) The homogeneity reliability and the split-half reliability of subthreshold depression scale and the four factors were above 0.800, the retest reliability was also about 0.700. That showed subthreshold depression scale as the assessment tools of subthreshold depression population is stability and credible. The research also thought that subthreshold depression had good content validity by the analysis of validity. The correlations of the four factors in subthreshold depression scale were between 0.641-0.749, and were between 0.851-0.920 for the correlation of each related factors and total score. This showed subthreshold depression scale had good construct validity. The scores of the four factors of subthreshold depression scale and the CES-D were between 0.622-0.764 in the correlation coefficient, and thought it was a high level of correlation which there were statistically significant at the 0.01 level.Conclusions:(1) The Self-subthreshold Depression Scale (STDS) forms four dimensions including social dysfunction, low self-concept, physiological dysfunction and depression mood. The subthreshold depression scale contains 29 items, using the 1-5 score, and assessing the time range for the last month.(2) The subthreshold depression scale has good reliability and validity. The assessment tool can be used as the special screening tools for the crowed of subthreshold depression and the applicable tool for the epidemiological studies of subthreshold depression.