Psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the depression anxiety stress scales for youth (DASS-Y-C) and its application

To sinicize the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales for Youth (DASS-Y) and comprehensively analyze the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of DASS-Y (DASS-Y-C) in higher vocational college students. The Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy translation methodology was used to sinicize the DASS-Y. Classical test theory and item response theory tests were used to analyze the reliability and validity of DASS-Y-C. A total of 404 students from a higher vocational college in Suzhou were selected to conduct a questionnaire survey. The DASS-Y-C has good item quality, internal reliability, convergent validity and discrimination. Person separation reliability demonstrated that the DASS-Y-C was able to distinguish between adolescents with different levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the three-factor model had an acceptable goodness-of-fit. The DASS-Y-C was positively moderately correlated with the adverse event psychological feelings and the negative affect score, and negatively weakly correlated with the positive affect score. The test-retest reliability of DASS-Y-C was 0.803, and the test-retest reliability of each dimension was 0.480 ~ 0.733. However, the DASS-Y-C has gender measurement differences, and the items of the depression and anxiety scales are relatively difficult to understand in this study. DASS-Y-C has good reliability and validity and can effectively measure the negative emotion structure of higher vocational college Students, which is worthy of further promotion.