The Beck Inventory Depression II (BDI-II) is one of the most widely used measures for screening for and measuring depressive symptoms in clinical and nonclinical samples. It is a 21-item self-report questionnaire administered in multiple-choice format and takes about 10 minutes to complete. It has good psychometric properties including internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and construct validity. Moreover, convergent and discriminant validity with other standard measures has been demonstrated. The BDI-II has been translated into many languages and is suitable for use in different cultures and sample profiles.
Beck Inventory Depression II its strong psychometric properties, there are some concerns about the reliability and validity of the BDI-II in medical samples. To assess this, a systematic review of the literature was conducted using ISI, Medline, and PsycINFO databases. Studies were selected based on the following criteria:
A total of 87 studies was included in this review. Most of the investigations reported high internal consistency and construct validity. However, a number of investigations showed that the BDI-II has poor invariance with regard to gender and age (e.g., college students; Huang & Chen, Citation2014; Wang & Gorenstein, Citation2013a). The sensitivity of the BDI-II to change is also questionable. Future research should investigate methods such as item-total correlation and IRT analysis to enhance the psychometric properties of the BDI-II in different populations and settings. Furthermore, investigations of the latent structure of the BDI-II in the context of medical patients should consider the use of state-of-the-art confirmatory factor analyses.