THE BECK DEPRESSION INVENTORY (FRENCH VERSION) - TESTING FOR GENDER-INVARIANT FACTORIAL STRUCTURE FOR NONCLINICAL ADOLESCENTS

The purposes of the study were threefold: (a) to test for the factoria l validity of the French version of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI -FR) separately for nonclinical adolescent francophone males (n = 551) and females (n = 601), (b) to cross-validate findings across a second independent sample for each gender, and (c) to test for equivalent fa ctorial structure across gender for this population. Except for one di fferential factor loading for females (Item 17), the hypothesized high er order 4-factor structure was found to be both tenable across valida tion samples and factorially invariant across gender. Although the pre sence of error covariances for females partially replicated a similar pattern for English female adolescents, results generally provide stro ng support for the psychometric soundness of the BDI-FR.