“…The scale correlates highly with the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erraugh, 1961), with reported zero order correlations of 0.76 and 0.81 (Schaeffer et al, 1985). High correlations have also been reported between the SDS and the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (Hamilton, 1960), r = 0.8 (Biggs, Wylie, & Ziegler, 1978), the Depression Scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI; Hathaway & McKinley, 1942), r = 0.61 and 0.73 (Schaeffer et al, 1985), and the MMPI-2 Depression Scale (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kraemmer, 1989), r = 0.77 (Thurber, Snow & Honts, 2002). The scale has been shown to effectively discriminate between depressed and non-depressed samples (Biggs et al, 1978;de Jonghe & Baneke, 1989;Gabrys & Peters, 1985;Schaeffer et al, 1985;Thurber et al, 2002), and to adequately distinguish between mild, moderate and severe depressive symptoms (Biggs et al, 1978).…”