• Gioia Bottesi, Marta Ghisi, Gianmarco Altoè, Erica Conforti, Gabriele Melli, and Claudio Sica.
• Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Italy. Electronic address: gioia.bottesi@unipd.it.
• Compr Psychiatry. 2015 Jul 1; 60: 170-81.

ObjectiveThe Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 (DASS-21) is the short version of a self-report measure that was originally developed to provide maximum differentiation between depressive and anxious symptoms. Despite encouraging evidence, the factor structure and other features of the DASS-21 are yet to be firmly established.MethodA community sample of 417 participants and two clinical groups (32 depressive patients and 25 anxious patients) completed the Italian version of the DASS-21 along with several measures of psychopathology.ResultsConfirmatory factor analyses suggested that the DASS-21 is a measure of general distress plus three additional orthogonal dimensions (anxiety, depression, and stress). The internal consistency and temporal stability of the measure were good; each DASS-21 scale correlated more strongly with a measure of a similar construct, demonstrating good convergent and divergent validity. Lastly, the DASS-21 demonstrated good criterion-oriented validity.ConclusionThe validity of the Italian DASS-21 and its utility, both for community and clinical individuals, are supported.Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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