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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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The structure of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale in four cohorts of community-based, health older people
— the HALCyon program | | Author(s) | Catharine R Gale, Michael Allerhand, Avan Aihie Sayer |
| Journal title | International Psychogeriatrics, vol 22, no 4, June 2010 |
| Pages | pp 559-571 |
| Source | http://www.journals.cambridge.org/ipg doi:10.1017/S1041610210000256 |
| Keywords | Anxiety ; Depression ; Symptoms ; Living in the community ; Evaluation ; Caerphilly ; Hertfordshire ; Lothians. |
| Annotation | The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) is widely used, but evaluation of its psychometric properties has produced equivocal results. Little is known about its structure in non-clinical samples of older people. The authors used data from four cohorts in the HALCyon collaborative research program into healthy aging: the Caerphilly Prospective Study, the Hertfordshire Ageing Study, the Hertfordshire Cohort Study, and the Lothian Birth Cohort 1921. They used exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis with multi-group comparisons to establish the structure of the HADS and test for factorial invariance between samples. Exploratory factor analysis showed a bi-dimensional structure (anxiety and depression) of the scale in men and women in each cohort. Researchers tested a hypothesised three-factor model but high correlations between two of the factors made a two-factor model more psychologically plausible. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the sizes of the respective item loadings on the two factors were effectively identical in men and women from the same cohort. There was more variation between cohorts, particularly those from different parts of the UK and in whom the HADS was administered differently. Differences in social-class distribution accounted for part of this variation. Scoring the HADS as two subscales of anxiety and depression is appropriate in non-clinical populations of older men and women. However, there were differences between cohorts in the way that individual items were linked with the constructs of anxiety and depression, perhaps due to differences in sociocultural factors and/or in the administration of the scale. (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-100927201 A |
| Classmark | ENP: ENR: CT: K4: 4C: 94E: 8HT: 9S |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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