Psychometric Properties and Factor Structure Validation of a Hindi version of twenty-one items Depression Anxiety Stress Scale

The twenty-one-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21) is a widely used measure for assessing depression, anxiety, and stress. Despite its popularity, existing Hindi translations of the DASS-21 have struggled to accurately convey the intended psychological and semantic meanings and provide insufficient empirical support for its three factor-model. Moreover, to date no validation study in Hindi, have examined second-order factor structure of DASS-21 and employed confirmatory factor analytic approach. Our study developed a new Hindi version of DASS-21 (DASS-21-H) and evaluates its psychometric properties and the first order three factor structure and second-order factor structure of DASS-21-H among Hindi speaking Indian adults using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The DASS-21-H demonstrated good reliability and convergent validity at both the subscale and scale levels. CFA confirmed the three-factor structure and revealed excellent fit for the second-order factor model, indicating that the DASS-21-H can provide a single aggregate score of general psychological distress along with scores for individual psychopathological symptoms. Both the models showed configural, metric, and partial scalar invariance across sexes (male and female). Our findings suggest that the DASS-21-H is a reliable and valid tool to measure depression, anxiety and stress as well as psychological distress in Hindi-speaking populations. However, further validation with larger, more diverse samples is required to confirm these findings.