Measurement invariance of depression symptom ratings across African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Caucasian adolescent psychiatric inpatients.

The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) is widely used to assess adolescent depressive symptom severity. Psychometric investigations, including factor-analytic studies, with adolescents support the reliability and validity of the BDI-II. However, a major limitation of this research is that samples have been predominantly Caucasian/White. This is critical because depressive illness is highly prevalent across race and ethnicity, and the extent...