Definition
The Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS; Yesavage et al. 1983) is a 30-item self-report measure designed to assess and screen depressive symptoms among older adults. It is the most popular and widely used screening measure for depression, and it has a wealth of psychometric data supporting its use.
Overview
Development
The GDS was developed in response to concerns of poor applicability of pre-existing depression screeners in assessing older adults (Yesavage et al. 1983). A common deficit of measures not designed specifically for use with older adults is a lack of item relevance to older adults, which skews scores and leads to potential misdiagnosis. As an example, many depression measures include somatic symptoms, which are often over-reported by older adults due to outside factors (e.g., medical conditions), resulting in inaccurate results and high rates of false-positive diagnoses. To address these problems, the GDS includes relatively few somatic items and contains items...
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References
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Stone, L.E., Granier, K.L., Segal, D.L. (2019). Geriatric Depression Scale. In: Gu, D., Dupre, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_736-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_736-1
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