Another study (Flint & Rifat, 1996) was conducted to validate the HADS as a measure of the severity of geriatric depression. The HADS Depression Scale had a high correlation (.73) to the Hamilton Rating Scale for depression (Hamilton,1960). The HADS has been widely used since its creation in 1983 in several studies designed specifically to measure anxiety and depression. (Flint & Rifat, 1997; Geddes & Chamberlain, 1994; Herrmann, Brand-Driehorst, Buss & Rueger, 2000; Watenabe, Shiel, Asami, Taki & Tabuchi, 2000) The HADS has been translated and tested for reliability and validity in at least three languages, Chinese, German and Urdu. In a study conducted to test the validity of a Spanish version of the BDI (Suarez-Mendoza, Caballero-Uribe, Ortega-Soto & Marquez-Marin, 1997), it was found that that the BDI had a high correlation with the HADS and thus showed adequate construct validity. Results of all of these studies indicate good reliability and validity when comparing the English version to the translated version (Herrmann, Scholz & Kreuzer, 1991; Leung, Ho & Kan, 1993; Mumford, Tareen, Bajwa& Bhatti, 1991)
The HADS is a self-administered questionnaire. It has the advantage of being brief with only 7 items used to measure depression, and 7 items used to measure anxiety. The brevity of this instrument lends itself well for use in a study of this nature as it will require only 5-10 minutes of the student’s time and therefore not interrupt normal class scheduling to a significant degree. Scores of 1-7 on the HADS are considered normal, 8-10 indicates borderline clinical depression/anxiety, and 11-21 indicates mild to moderate depression/anxiety.
