Single item measures of parental history of depression: Do adult children's responses agree with their parents' own reports?

BACKGROUND: Parental history of depression is a risk factor for major depressive disorder. In many cases, it is impractical or impossible to contact parents directly to assess their depression history. Although validated, multi-item instruments that assess parental history of depression are available, a single item measure (e.g., has your mother/father ever had depression?) is still used in many settings. This study examined the agreement between responses of adult children (n = 10,142) on the single item measure and parents' own responses on a validated measure of lifetime history of major depressive disorder and a single item measure of their depression history.

DESIGN: Data came from the Lifelines cohort study, which is a community-based study in the Netherlands. Parents completed the Lifetime Depression Assessment Self-report (LIDAS) and self-reported if they had a history of depression. Kappa, sensitivity, selectivity, positive predictive vale, and negative predictive value were calculated.

RESULTS: There was minimal-fair agreement between the single item measure of parental history of depression and parents' own status on the LIDAS (κfathers = 0.24, κmothers = 0.25) and single item measure of depression history (κfathers = 0.36, κmothers = 0.39). In all analyses, specificity was high, whereas sensitivity was relatively low.

CONCLUSION: The minimal-fair agreement between the single item measure of parental history of depression and parents' own responses was driven by adult children's underestimation or unawareness of their parents having a history of depression. The observed levels of agreement were similar to those of other studies that used multi-item measures to examine agreement between informant reports and first-degree relatives' history of depression.