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Page 1 of 2 Psychometric Tests for Anxiety and Depression - On Saturday 2nd June at an AHA seminar at the Quest on Doncaster, Charles Huson spoke on the subject of psychometric tests for anxiety and depression and his psychological assessment report format. Charles holds a Master of Psychology and specializes in pain and trauma management at the Melbourne Spinal Clinic and at his private practice in Berwick.
He gave a clear, fast-paced presentation with a manual for each participant of the major anxiety and depression questionnaires he uses. The recommendation was to find the scales you are most comfortable using and then continue with these so you get a real feel for the scores. For instance, Charles always uses the SDS (Zung) for rating a client’s level of depression.
The SAS, SDS and STAI are self-rated tests with validity scales that can be used for client reports for the legal system, TAC, Victims of Crime Compensation or Workcare. Each of these tests and its application is briefly described here.
The SAS (Zung) measures anxiety level over the past week. Raw scores are converted to an SAS Index of four categories: no anxiety; mild anxiety; moderate anxiety; and severe anxiety. The lower the SAS Index, the lower the anxiety level.
Full details of the SAS (Zung) can be found in Zung, William W.K. (1971) A Rating Instrument for Anxiety Disorder. Psychosomatics, XII, 6. 371-379. The SDS (Zung) is a self-rating depression scale of twenty questions where the results are classified into four categories: no depression, mild depression, moderate depression and severe depression. It is widely used to measure depression and is recognized by physicians and clinicians worldwide.
It is scored similarly to the SAS for anxiety, with raw scores being converted to an SDS Index. The lower the SDS Index, the lower the level of depression. Full details can be found in Zung, W.M.K., 1965, A Self-rating Depression Scale, Archives of General Psychiatry, 12, 63-70.
Despite the Beck Depression Inventory’s near perfect correlation (.9) with the SDS (Zung) the latter has the advantage that not all negative answers are on one side of the questionnaire with positive answers on the other.
Both State and Trait Anxiety are measured by the STAI (Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg & Jacobs, 1983). No other self-evaluation questionnaire measures both the person’s background level of anxiety-proneness (Trait Anxiety) as well as specific reactions to current anxiety-provoking stimuli (State Anxiety). The STAI scores, which are categorized according to age and sex, are shown in percentage terms and are useful in helping clients see their prior learning as a factor in their present behaviour. Monthly reassessments show the effects of anxiety reduction therapies. The SAS (Zung) is however the simplest measure of anxiety.
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