Abstract:
BACKGROUND: The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale was developed as a selfassessment tool to identify anxiety and depression in patients of age 16-65 years. Its use in
younger age groups and illiterate populations is not well examined. The purpose of this study
was to examine the structure, reliability, and applicability of its Amharic version in a
community sample of early orphan adolescents.
METHODS: Secondary data primarily collected from randomly selected 804 orphans using
the Amharic version of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale by interview technique in
March 2010 in Addis Ababa was used with permission. Confirmatory factor analysis with
principal components extraction and oblique rotation (delta=0) was computed. The internal
consistency of the subscales was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha and the correlation between
the subscales was assessed using Pearson correlation.
RESULTS: In the whole sample (age 11-18 years), two factors: anxiety and depression,
explaining a total of 45.9% of the variance were found. In the 11-15 years sub-sample, the
same two factors were extracted explaining a total of 45.7% of the variance. The AmharicHADS had Cronbach’s alpha of 0.81 and 0.76 in the whole sample for the anxiety and
depression sub-scales, respectively. In the 11-15 years sub-sample the corresponding alpha
values for anxiety and depression scales were 0.80 and 0.77, respectively. The correlation
between the anxiety and the depression subscales were 0.66 (p<0.001) and 0.67 (p< 0.001) for
the whole sample and for the 11-15 years group, respectively.
CONCLUSION: Administering the Amharic version of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression
Scale by interviewers gave meaningful data starting from the age of 11 suggesting successful
applicability of the scale with further validation.
