Abstract
Reliability, validity, and normative data of the Beck Depression Inventory. This study analyzes the utility of the 1978 version of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Rush, Shaw y Emery, 1979) as an instrument to identify subclinically depressive subjects in studies intended to validate models of depression. The data were obtained with a sample of 1393 university students. Reliability was high: a) the coefficient alpha was 0.83 and b) test-retest correlations ranged from 0.60 to 0.72 for three different subgroups of the total sample. The convergent validity of the BDI was also high: its correlation with the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (Zung, 1965) ranged from 0.68 to 0.89 for two different subgroups of the total sample. Results derived from other studies of our group (Sanz, 1991; Avia et al., 1995) revealed that the discriminant validities of the BDI with respect to different specific traits of anxiety (social, evaluation, interpersonal and test anxieties) were moderately low, with correlations ranging from 0.11 to 0.45. No age or sex differences on the BDI scores were found for this sample and, therefore, norm scores were collapsed for the total sample of subjects.
