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Abstract
Adolescent depression is a significant contributor to the increased rate of suicide attempts and completed suicide in most developed countries including Australia and New Zealand. The purpose of this thesis was to develop and validate a screening instrument for adolescent depression - the Taouk Scale for Adolescent Depression (TSAD) to address the limitations of existing measures. Four focus groups were conducted to identify features commonly associated with adolescent depression that may or may not be emphasised in the literature or incorporated in current instruments. Results from these focus groups (N=32) were incorporated into the development of the TSAD. Although including a number of well-recognised symptoms of depression, a number of major themes not previously reported in the literature emerged from the focus groups, including the observation that clothing choice, music choice, and time spent online were significantly associated with depression in an adolescent cohort. Focus group participants further highlighted a number of difficulties in identifying adolescent depression, which included the paradoxical and masking behaviours that some teenagers engage in to conceal symptoms, and general lack of knowledge that adolescents have regarding depression and means to obtain assistance when depressed. The preliminary stages of development of the TSAD included a pilot sample review (N=41) of the initial 256 items drafted for the TSAD, as well as an expert panel review (N=16) of these items. A provisional 97-item version of the TSAD was administered to 3,120 secondary school students (2,239 females, 871 males, 10 not indicated) with a mean age of 15.70 (SD = 1.55) to enable study of the psychometric properties of the instrument and finalisation of the items. Four reliable factors comparable to those identified in previous research were obtained from an exploratory factor extraction, resulting in a 28-item instrument that was verified through a confirmatory factor analysis. The TSAD demonstrated significant positive correlations with convergent measures of depression, and weaker correlations with a divergent measure of resilience, suggesting convergent as well as discriminant validity. Finally, tests for differences in TSAD scores according to various demographic variables revealed that Indigenous participants, participants attending urban schools, overseas born participants, female participants, and older adolescent participants had higher scores. Future studies of the TSAD should include test-retest reliability and validity in clinical samples.