The National Center for American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research (NCAIANMHR) is one of four NIMH-sponsored minority mental health research centers and, among its functions, serves as a repository of data sets like those proposed for analysis in this application. The core funding of the NCAIANMHR does not provide the resources necessary to conduct extensive analyses of such data. Consequently, this application seeks support to enable the investigators to carry out detailed analyses of three unique American Indian data sets, as well as several archival data sets sampling other populations, which promise to advance our understanding of the measurement of depressive symptomatology among American Indians. The CES-D was designed as a continuous measure of depressive symptomatology. The psychometric properties and dimensional structure of the CES-D have been studied in other populations, but no comparable work has been conducted with American Indians. The CES-D was included in three NCAIANMHR studies: a study of adolescent boarding school students (Data Set 1), a study of college students (Data Set 2), and a study of older adults with chronic illness (Data Set 3). The CES-D has been included in several national sample surveys, including a NIDA survey, the NHANES and HHANES, all of which are now available from archival sources. These combined resources allow an analysis of the psychometric properties of this instrument both within the three American Indian data sets, and in the comparison with data from other populations.
The specific aims of the proposed analyses are: 1) To examine the dimensional properties of the CES-D within each American Indian data set. 2) To examine the dimensional properties of the CES-D across each of the three American Indian data sets. 3) To compare this structure with comparable data on other populations from the 1985 NIDA survey, the NHANES Followup Survey, and the HHANES survey. These data will permit a thorough examination of the dimensional structure of this instrument with all three samples, as well as comparison to other populations.
