A study on construction, validation and determination of normalization of adolescents depression scale

Article history: Received Feb 28, 2013 Received in revised format 19 September 2013 Accepted 23 October 2013 Available online November 28 2013 This paper presents an empirical investigation to construct, to validate and to determine normalization factors associated with adolescents depression scale. The study is performed among 750 randomly selected guided and high school students, 364 male and 386 female, who live in city of Zanjan, Iran. Validity of Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Validity of SimpsonAngus Scale (SAS) and divergence validity of the Coopersmith selfesteem coefficients are 0.72, 0.37 and -0.71, respectively. Result suggests that adolescents’ depression test is a reliable and valid tool for assessing depression, with utility in both research and clinical settings, counseling centers. In addition, the results of correlation test indicate there are some meaningful differences between depression levels of female and male students. In fact, our survey indicates that female students have more depression than male students do (F-value = 33.06, Sig. = 0.000). In addition, there are some meaningful differences between depression levels in various educational levels (F-value = 8.59, Sig. = 0.000). However, the study does not find sufficient evidence to believe there is any meaningful correlation between educational backgrounds and gender.