DASS-Y Depression Anxiety Stress Scale Youth

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What is DASS-Y

The Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale - Youth (DASS-Y) is a psychometrically sound brief dimensional measure of depression, anxiety and stress in children and adolescents aged 8–17. The DASS-Y is a 21-item youth version of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS; Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995b). The DASS is a set of psychometrically sound scales that is widely used to assess negative emotional states in adults.

DASS-Y Printable PDF

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DASS-Y Scoring and Interpretation

The DASS-Y has 21 items and uses the same scoring template as the adult DASS and DASS21.

The DASS-Y consists of 21 sentences. Participants rate how TRUE each sentence was of them during the past week, on a 4-point (0,1,2,3) severity/frequency scale. Scores for the Depression, Anxiety and Stress scales are determined by summing the scores for the relevant 7 items.

The following indicates which items belong to which scale.

Depression - Items 3, 5, 10, 13, 16, 17, 21

Anxiety Items 2, 4, 7, 9, 15, 19, 20

Stress - Items 1, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 18

If you are using the DASS-Y (21 items) there will be 7 items per scale so you will only apply the scoring template to the single sheet; you do NOT need to multiply the scores by 2 as per the DASS21, because the DASS-Y is a standalone instrument with scores that cannot be directly compared to either of the adult questionnaires (DASS and DASS21).

Severity cutoffs for the DASS-Y

Table 4
	Depression	Anxiety	Stress	Total
Normal	0-6	0-5	0-11	0-23
Mild	7-8	6-7	12-13	24-29
Moderate	9-13	8-12	14-16	30-39
Severe	14-16	13-15	17-18	40-46
Extremely severe	17+	16+	19+	47+

PsyPack can automatically score the DASS-Y assessment and prepare corresponding tables and graphs.

Further, PsyPack automatically plots a graph to help you easily track progress over time.

Sample Report of DASS-Y

Domain

Depression, Anxiety, Stress

What does DASS-Y measure

The purpose of the evaluation is to:

measure depression, anxiety and stress in children and adolescents aged 8–17.

Administration

Self-administered

Type of outcome tool

Clinical

Assessment modes

Questionnaire

Age and eligibility

8-17 years

Estimated time

5 to 10 minutes

Notes

Since the questionnaire relies on client self-report, all responses should be verified by the clinician, and a definitive diagnosis is made on clinical grounds taking into account how well the client understood the questionnaire, as well as other relevant information from the client.

The results of authors of DASS-Y show that it is possible to identify a core set of symptoms that define depression, anxiety and stress in children and adolescents, and that these symptoms are similar to those previously established in adults (Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995a,b). In particular, thier findings indicate that a stress construct can also be assessed in youth via self-report, and that it is associated with worrying in children and adolescents from grade 5 (about 10–11 years of age) onwards. Their data suggest that the DASS-Y provides a psychometrically sound brief dimensional measure of depression, anxiety and stress in children and adolescents aged 8–17. The availability of this measure fills an important gap in their current repertoire of instruments for assessing negative emotional states in youth. Like the tripartite model, the DASS-Y is empirically based and provides scores that are graded in severity, reflecting the distribution of symptom levels observed in the population. However, the DASS-Y excludes non-specific indicators of general distress, and it assesses an additional coherent syndrome of stress. The DASS-Y is a public domain instrument, and, like the adult DASS, they believe it will prove useful in both research and clinical contexts.

For descriptive purposes, the cutoff scores for the DASS-Y scales and total scores have been calculated, following the same procedure as described in the DASS manual for the adult DASS.

These cutoffs were derived from the sample of N=2121 reported in Szabo & Lovibond (2022), using the same percentile ranges as for the adult DASS.

The DASS-Y has 21 items and uses the same scoring template as the adult DASS and DASS21. Please note that it is NOT necessary to multiply the scores by 2 as per the DASS21, because the DASS-Y is a standalone instrument with scores that cannot be directly compared to either of the adult questionnaires.

Attribution and References

Szabo M and Lovibond PF (2022) Development and Psychometric Properties of the DASS-Youth (DASS-Y): An Extension of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) to Adolescents and Children. Front. Psychol. 13:766890. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.766890

Official website

Archived link