Reliability and factorial structure of the chinese version of the Beck Depression Inventory

The Chinese version of the Beck Depression Inventory (C-BDI) was administered to 2,150 Chinese secondary school students. The BDI was found to have high internal consistency as a scale and high item-total correlations for most of the items. Factor analysis with a two-factor solution showed that two factors were abstracted from the scale, namely, general depression and somatic disturbances. By randomly splitting the total sample into two subsamples, these two factors could be reproduced reliably, and high coefficients of congruence were found. These findings generally suggest that the Chinese version of the BDI possesses acceptable psychometric properties, and the factor analytic data tend to support Beck's multi-dimensional view of depression as a construct.