Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21) for Finnish-speaking Adults: Validation and Normative Data

Luka Elliott Joonatan Vähäsarja, Jari Lipsanen, Anne Kouvonen, Eero Lahelma, Raimo Lappalainen, Marianna Virtanen and Tea Lallukka

No d7vu2, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: We conducted the first validation of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21) in Finnish. DASS-21 is a short public-domain questionnaire, which presents a way to quickly and effectively screen for mental ill-health. We recruited two large samples, one aged 24–45 (N = 3,101 [2,488 women]), the other aged 60–82 (N = 5,462 [4,473 women]), all employees of the City of Helsinki at inclusion (2017 and 2000–2002). DASS-21 measured depression, anxiety, stress, and general distress reliably among Finnish-speaking adults. It appeared invariant with age and gender as evinced by invariance analyses, latent mean comparisons, and an examination of psychometric properties for the subscales and individual items. The subscales negatively correlated with the Emotional Well-being subscale of the RAND-36, as expected. A comparison of five structural models using confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and a robust estimation method (WLSMV) showed good fit for a one-factor solution. We discuss the use and interpretation of the DASS-21 as both a measure of specific affective symptoms and unidimensional General Distress. We provide future researchers and clinicians with norms and estimates of measurement error among Finnish-speaking adults.

Date: 2025-01-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6789499dda1e039a1890053c/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:d7vu2

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/d7vu2

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().