Children's Depression Scale: validation with child psychiatric inpatients.

The present investigation examined the psychometric characteristics and correlates of the Children's Depression Scale (CDS) with psychiatric impatient children (n = 185; ages 7-12) and their parents (n = 154). The results revealed: high internal consistency of the CDS, significant correlations of CDS scores with other measures of depression and related constructs (hopelessness, self-esteem) and significant differences in CDS depression and positive experience scores for children independently diagnosed as meeting Research Diagnostic Criteria for depression versus other disorders. Parent CDS scores permitted finer diagnostic discriminations and revealed age and gender differences in childhood depression not evident from the children's scores.