Depression in College Students: Student Experience Inventory.

To assess depression in college students, two inventories were compared: the Student Experience Inventory (SEI) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). SEI, a self-report questionnaire, contains 56 items that are designed to measure hopelessness and decreased energy levels, as well as five factors covered in BDI: (1) negative affect toward self, (2) negative physiological symptoms, (3) general unhappiness, (4) performance difficulties, and (5) loss of personal and social interest. Unlike BDI, SEI is worded to reflect specific, common college experiences, as well as the duality of phenomena (e.g., physiological reactions). SEI uses a counterbalancing of items to lessen the probability of response bias. Items within the SEI were analyzed using item-total correlations. The four items with the highest item-total correlations within each of seven subdomains were selected for inclusion in the SEI. Coefficient alpha was also computed to assess internal consistency, and a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was calculated to assess concurrent validity. The SEI appeared to measure a construct similar but not identical to the construct measured by BDI. The results suggest that further development of SEI may allow for the assessment of those aspects of depression specific to the college population. The SEI is appended. (SW)