DEWIPA - Developing a standardised questionnaire to determine depressed patients' knowledge of their disease

Objective: The aim of this study was ro develop a questionnaire for measuri ng depressed patients' knowledge of their diesease. Methods: 55 patients su ffering from depressive episodes answered a 77-items questionnaire. Results : Item analysis showed a discriminative power higher than 30 for 40 items, all of which applied to one factor. The items were arranged into two themat ically similar 20 items forms. We added four additional items (discriminati ve power between 0.20 and 0.29) because future research may lead to differe nt results concerning discriminative power. The questionnaires DEWIPA-A and DEWIPA-B consists of 24 items each. The average difficulty is equal for bo th DEWIPA forms and they both possess significant discriminative power. Con clusions: Our results support the hypothesis that DEWIPA is a valid and rel iable instrument to determine patients' knowledge of symptoms, causes and t he psychopharmacological treatment of depression.