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Brief Report: Psychometric Properties of the Patient Health Questionaire-9 (PHQ-9) in Autistic Adults

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Abstract

Despite the high prevalence of depression and other mental illnesses in autistic adults, screening instruments such as the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) have not been specifically validated in an autistic sample. Using data from two Autism CRC longitudinal studies (n = 581), confirmatory factor analysis supported the two-factor model (somatic and cognitive/affective) in the autistic sample and one-factor model in the community comparison sample. Confirmatory bifactor analysis also supported use of the PHQ-9 total score in autism. Good convergent validity was found with two measures of psychological well-being for PHQ-9 total and subdomain scores. The PHQ-9 is a useful tool for autism research allowing comparison across autistic and non-autistic participants.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation and participation of all participants on the autism spectrum and their carers involved in this study.

Funding

This work was supported by the Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism (Autism CRC), established and supported under the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Program.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Developmental Disability Neuropsychiatry (3DN), UNSW Sydney, 34 Botany St, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

    Samuel R. C. Arnold, Ye In Hwang & Julian N. Trollor

  2. Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre, School of Psychology and Public Health, La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, Australia

    Amanda L. Richdale & Lauren P. Lawson

  3. Stanford Autism Center, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, USA

    Mirko Uljarević

  4. Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism (Autism CRC), Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Samuel R. C. Arnold, Ye In Hwang, Amanda L. Richdale, Julian N. Trollor & Lauren P. Lawson

Authors
  1. Samuel R. C. Arnold
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  2. Mirko Uljarević
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  3. Ye In Hwang
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  4. Amanda L. Richdale
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  5. Julian N. Trollor
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  6. Lauren P. Lawson
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Contributions

SRCA conceived the study and conducted data analysis with LPL. SRCA, LPL, MU, YIH, ALR, JNT contributed to planning, design of the study, data analysis, and writing.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Samuel R. C. Arnold.

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Conflict of interest

The authors have no conflict of interest to report.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants when they enrolled in the SASLA and ALSAA.

Research Involving Human and Animal Rights

This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Arnold, S.R.C., Uljarević, M., Hwang, Y.I. et al. Brief Report: Psychometric Properties of the Patient Health Questionaire-9 (PHQ-9) in Autistic Adults. J Autism Dev Disord 50, 2217–2225 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-03947-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-03947-9

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