Revisiting the factor structure of the EURO-D, a depressive symptomatology scale: an Exploratory Graph Analysis in 26 European countries

The EURO-D scale is a short instrument employed to measure twelve different symptoms of depression in adult population.Despite its wide use and multiple validations, its factor structure is still under debate.Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA), a novel network psychometric method, offers a promising approach to examining dimensionality.Methodology: 45390 participants (mean age = 71.27,57.4% women) from 26 European countries, using the 8th wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).The sample was randomly split into a derivation sample (n = 22823) and a cross-validation sample (n = 22567).EGA was applied to the derivation sample to determine the structure of the EURO-D scale, utilizing two estimation methods: Graphical Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (glasso) and Triangulated