The 16-Item quick inventory of depressive symptomatology (QIDS), clinician rating (QIDS-C), and self-report (QIDS-SR): a psychometric evaluation in patients with chronic major depression

✍ Scribed by A.John Rush; Madhukar H Trivedi; Hicham M Ibrahim; Thomas J Carmody; Bruce Arnow; Daniel N Klein; John C Markowitz; Philip T Ninan; Susan Kornstein; Rachel Manber; Michael E Thase; James H Kocsis; Martin B Keller

• Book ID: 119409072
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 99 KB
• Volume: 54
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0006-3223
• DOI: 10.1016/s0006-3223(02)01866-8

✦ Synopsis

Background
The 16-item Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QIDS), a new measure of depressive symptom severity derived from the 30-item Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS), is available in both self-report (QIDS-SR16) and clinician-rated (QIDS-C16) formats.

Methods
This report evaluates and compares the psychometric properties of the QIDS-SR16 in relation to the IDS-SR30 and the 24-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D24) in 596 adult outpatients treated for chronic nonpsychotic, major depressive disorder.

Results
Internal consistency was high for the QIDS-SR16 (Cronbach’s α = .86), the IDS-SR30 (Cronbach’s α = .92), and the HAM-D24 (Cronbach’s α = .88). QIDS-SR16 total scores were highly correlated with IDS-SR30 (.96) and HAM-D24 (.86) total scores. Item–total correlations revealed that several similar items were highly correlated with both QIDS-SR16 and IDS-SR30 total scores. Roughly 1.3 times the QIDS-SR16 total score is predictive of the HAM-D17 (17-item version of the HAM-D) total score.

Conclusions
The QIDS-SR16 was as sensitive to symptom change as the IDS-SR30 and HAM-D24, indicating high concurrent validity for all three scales. The QIDS-SR16 has highly acceptable psychometric properties, which supports the usefulness of this brief rating of depressive symptom severity in both clinical and research settings.