The bdi 2 score is a popular and highly reliable instrument used to assess the presence and intensity of depressive symptoms. It is often used to screen patients for depression or to evaluate the effectiveness of antidepressant medication. However, this instrument does have some limitations that should be considered before its use. The first limitation is that the BDI does not include any safeguards against faking or lying. Consequently, its scores may be misleading. The second limitation is that the BDI does not take into account a patient’s culture. This means that it may not be as accurate in some cultures as other instruments that are designed to measure depression in a specific cultural context.
The original BDI is a 21-item self-administered questionnaire that asks examinees to rate the frequency and severity of a set of symptoms including sadness, pessimism, hopelessness, guilt, worthlessness, loss of interest or pleasure, irritability, apathy, agitation, indecisiveness, concentration difficulty, sleep disturbance and somatic preoccupation (Beck & Steer, 1988). The BDI also includes questions on suicidal thoughts, episodes of crying, and feelings of hopelessness. The BDI is available in both paper-and-pencil and computer versions, takes 5-10 minutes to complete and can be administered individually or in groups. It is also translated into many languages, including French, Korean, and Xhosa.
Several studies have examined the reliability and validity of the BDI. The internal consistency of the BDI has been reported to range from 0.76 to 0.95 in different studies with psychiatric populations. Test-retest reliability has been found to be between 0.67 and 0.92 in the same population.
The BDI has good discriminative validity, with an adequate sensitivity of 0.705 and a low false-positive rate of 0.478. It is also a relatively short instrument that can be used to rapidly screen for depression in a clinical setting. However, some experts have questioned whether the BDI is sufficiently sensitive and specific for this purpose.
Another drawback of the BDI is that it is a self-report instrument and, therefore, susceptible to social desirability bias. Studies of BDI-II using a manipulated version of the questionnaire in which the items were padded with statements not relating to depression have shown that subjects who responded to these manipulated questions scored significantly higher than those who administered the unmanipulated BDI. It is therefore important to evaluate the BDI-II against social desirability bias in clinical practice.
The BDI-II is a newer version of the BDI that was developed in 1996. The BDI-II drops four items related to body weight change, changes in appetite and somatic symptoms from the original BDI and adds two items that reflect mood states not covered by the previous set of questions. This revision was intended to take into account DSM-IV criteria for depression. Different factor structure models have been tested, and results have supported a bifactor model with a general depression factor and three specific factors. This result is in line with other studies that have shown good psychometric properties of the BDI-II.