Brief report: The factor structure of mood states in an early adolescent sample

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the structure of negative mood states among young adolescents. Students aged 11–15 years from a secondary school in Melbourne, Australia, completed the Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scales (DASS) [Lovibond, S. H., & Lovibond, P. F. (1996). Depression anxiety stress scales. Sydney: The Psychology Foundation of Australia Inc.]. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) failed to find support for a three‐factor model. Further analyses suggested that items from the DASS were best represented by two factors, namely a generalized negativity factor and a factor comprising items indicating physiological arousal.

The Structure of Anxiety and Depression in a Normative Sample of Younger and Older Australian Adolescents

“…The CFA strategy employed here allowing all items to load on the NA factor may also explain Fig. 1 Model 4 item loadings for younger adolescents, and older adolescents (in parentheses) discrepancies with previous Australian studies (Buckby et al 2008;Duffy et al 2005). Here, this analytical strategy reduced correlations between depression and anxiety factors to below 0.32, whereas the previous Australian series have reported highly correlated factors above 0.85.…”

“…Importantly, this study adds to previous research by using CFA for tripartite dimensions among a youth sample, and is perhaps the largest study to show support for this model in an Australian adolescent sample compared to previous studies (Boyd and Gullone 1997;Buckby et al 2008;Duffy et al 2005). These series showed that two factor models provided better fit and parsimony than the tripartite model (Buckby et al 2008;Duffy et al 2005) while Boyd and Gullone (1997) claimed not to have extracted an NA factor.…”

“…These series showed that two factor models provided better fit and parsimony than the tripartite model (Buckby et al 2008;Duffy et al 2005) while Boyd and Gullone (1997) claimed not to have extracted an NA factor. However, upon closer examination of the findings reported by Boyd and Gullone (1997) it could be argued that factor II (i.e.…”

“…Previous factor analytic studies have not supported the tripartite model in Australian populations (Boyd and Gullone 1997;Buckby et al 2008;Duffy et al 2005), therefore questioning the applicability of this model to Australian youth. While the tripartite structure has been shown to be cross-culturally valid in European (Kiernan et al 2001) and Korean child samples (Yang et al 2006), further research in diverse multi-ethnic groups is crucial to further support the tripartite model's validity as this may yield important understandings of the cross-cultural expression of depression and anxiety in adolescents.…”

Traumatic Brain Injury-Induced Hypopituitarism in Adolescence

“…Along with the development of conceptual thought comes the ability to struggle with issues of self identity and intimacy. Most adolescents confront the developmental tasks of this period with energy, and with a burgeoning sense of independence, selfsufficiency, and selfconfidence [9,10]. However, they are also more aware of the fragility of life and the reality of death.…”