Screening for depressive symptoms in clinical and nonclinical youth: The psychometric properties of the Dutch Children’s Depression Inventory-2 (CDI-2)

Objective: This study investigated the utility of the second version of the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI-2) as a screening tool to identify children and adolescents aged 8-21 years suffering from depressive symptoms.

Method: Data were collected by combining questionnaire data from multiple clinical and control subsamples in which the CDI-2 child and parent version were administered to clinically depressed children (n = 111), children with other psychiatric disorders (n = 74) and control children (n = 2246) as well as their parents (respectively n = 104, n = 112, n = 2130).

Results: Results showed that the CDI-2 has good psychometric properties in terms of internal consistency, factor structure, parent-child agreement, convergent and divergent validity. However, the factor structure of the parent version was insufficient. The CDI-2 total score of the child version and parent version can differentiate between clinically depressed children, children with other psychiatric disorders, and control children. Further, reliable cut-off scores were established. There were also significant gender and age effects.

Conclusion: The total score of the CDI-2 child and parent version can be used as a screening tool to detect clinically significant depressive symptoms in children and adolescents.