Validation of the Kutcher Adolescent Depression Scale in a Caribbean student sample

Abstract

A cross the world, 10%-20% of children and adolescents have substantial mental health problems. 1 Elementary school children with depression are at greater risk for attempted and completed suicide than their healthy peers. 2 Depressive disorders that occur during childhood and adolescence have documented high rates of substance abuse, teenage pregnancy and delinquency. [3][4][5][6] Few investigations of depression have been performed among West Indian elementary school students, and even fewer among Jamaican and Barbadian students. 7 Lowe and colleagues [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] found that a relatively large proportion of adolescents in Caribbean secondary schools reported moderate to severe symptoms of depression, but little research has been done with preadolescents in this region.An important prerequisite for conducting research on depression among Jamaican and Barbadian preadolescents is the availability of an instrument that is valid for this group. It is well established that cultural factors influence perceptions and interpretations and, therefore, the validity of screening tools for depression. 15 The applicability of measures of depression developed elsewhere in the world must be established before any large-scale research can take place. Unique cultural factors of Jamaica and Barbados, Background: Research on depression among Caribbean children has been limited by a lack of valid and reliable measures. We addressed this problem by exploring the internal consistency reliability and the concurrent and discriminant validity of the Kutcher Adolescent Depression Rating Scale (KADS) among a wide cross-section of the student population attending elementary schools in Jamaica and Barbados.

A psycho-social analysis of depression, anxiety and student engagement: Effects of parenting practices

“…Cross-sectional data from Barbados were used from a larger multi-centre longitudinal quasi-experimental study. The sampling method and data analysis procedures employed were consistent with the methodology of published works by the authors (Lowe et al, 2018). Study permissions were received from the Institutional Review Board, parents and students from a cross-section of primary schools in Barbados (n = 293).…”

“…Predictors of depression and anxiety in middle childhood are worthy of exploration in Barbados and the wider Anglophone Caribbean, where the practice of high-stakes secondary school entrance examinations is firmly entrenched. The societal pressures placed on Caribbean children to succeed in these ‘high-stakes secondary school selection/placement examinations’ (De Lisle, 2012) are likely to have detrimental psychological consequences such as depression and anxiety for them (Lowe et al, 2018; Smith, 2018) . The relationship between high-stakes examinations and anxiety and depression has been reported in the United Kingdom, together with the observation that children often experience a fear of academic failure (‘State of Education’; Weale, 1 May 2017), that may influence the way and the degree to which children are engaged in the classroom.…”

Validation of the Major Depressive Disorder Subscale (MDDS) of the Revised Child Anxiety & Depression Scale (RCADS) in a Sample of Jamaican and Barbadian Elementary School Children

“…Depression is reported to be common among Englishspeaking Caribbean children of elementary school-age. 19 Recognised risk factors for depression among children in this age-group are largely related to long-standing stressors such as parental discord, trauma, abuse and school difficulties. 20 This would include the high level of stress associated with the educational system in the English-speaking Caribbean.…”

“…[24][25] Additionally, secondary school placements may determine future educational opportunities and career paths through academic tracking. 11,[14][15][16][17][18][19]21,22 There is significant societal pressure, which is associated with depression and other stress related issues, for children to perform well enough on their exit examinations to be placed at the more prestigious secondary schools. 11,[14][15][16][17][18]…”

Secondary Prevention of Depressive Prodrome in Adolescents: Before and after Attending a Jogging Program on Campus

“…Previous articles reported several self-rated measures to identify the depressive symptoms with full confidence [ 19 , 25 , 30 , 31 ] but no clinical interviews being referred to support the diagnosis, the rate of misjudgment was quite high [ 32 , 33 ]. On the base of the Kutcher Adolescent Depression Scale, Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and Hamilton rating scale for depression [ 3 , 34 , 35 , 36 ], we established a self-rate measure to assess the adolescent depressive prodrome [ 36 , 37 ], which evolves 16 depressive symptoms defined by DSM-5 with a 4-point scale and ranged total manifestation scores from 16–64 [ 38 , 39 ]. As false positive rate (FPR) is the probability of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis of a particular test, and sensitivity measures the proportion of true positives that are correctly identified [ 40 ]; when developing a screening instrument, we have to face with the balance between sensitivity and FPR [ 26 , 41 ].…”