ON THE VALIDITY OF THE BECK-DEPRESSION-INVENTORY - A REVIEW

The present review discusses validity aspects of the Beck Depression I nventory (BDI) on the basis of meta-analyses of studies on the psychom etric properties. Shortcomings of the BDI are its high Item difficulty , lack of representative norms, and thus doubtful objectivity of inter pretation, controversial factorial validity, instability of scores ove r short time intervals (over the course of 1 day), and poor discrimina nt validity against anxiety. Advantages of the inventory are its high internal consistency, high content validity, validity in differentiati ng between depressed and nondepressed subjects, sensitivity to change, and international propagation. The present gaper outlines agreements and contradictions between the various studies on the BDI and discusse s the potential factors (composition of the subject sample. statistica l procedures, point in time of measurement) accounting for the varianc e in their results.