Depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescents across 30 countries: Cross-national measurement invariance and relationships with subjective well-being

Abstract

Cross-cultural empirical evidence on the validity of measures of depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescents is scarce and inconclusive. The present study investigated the cross-national measurement invariance and convergent validity evidence of the Depression and Anxiety scales of the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS-21). We sampled 16,802 adolescents (58.1% female) aged 14–19 years across 30 countries from five continents. Both exact and approximate measurement invariance were tested. The results provided evidence for the exploratory structural equation model (ESEM) as the best representation of the data in most countries. Full scalar invariance was not supported when tested a..