The Beck Depression Inventory (French Version): Testing for Gender-Invariant Factorial Structure for Nonclinical Adolescents

Abstract

The purposes of the study were threefold: (a) to testforthefactorial validity of the French version of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-FR) separatelyfornonclinical adolescent francophone males (n = 551) andfemales (n = 601), (b) to cross-validatefindings across a second independent sample for each gender, and (c) to test for equivalent factorial structure across genderfor this population. Exceptfor one differentialfactor loadingfor females (Item 17), the hypothesized higher order4-factor structure was found to be both tenable across validation samples andfactorially invariant across gender. Although the presence of error covariances for females partially replicated a similar pattern for Englishfemale adolescents, results generally provide strong supportfor the psychometric soundness of the BDI-FR.