Brief Description
The Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale-Youth (DASS-Y) is a cross-cutting assessment that measures emotional distress, specifically depression, anxiety, and stress in children aged 8-17. The depression scale assesses dysphoria, hopelessness, devaluation of life, self-deprecation, lack of interest / involvement, anhedonia, and inertia. The anxiety scale assesses autonomic arousal, skeletal muscle effects, situational anxiety, and subjective experience of anxious affect. The stress scale is sensitive to levels of chronic nonspecific arousal and assesses difficulty relaxing, nervous arousal, and being easily upset / agitated, irritable / over-reactive, and impatient. This abbreviated measure was adapted from the 21-item DASS for adults and has strong reliability and validity. Respondents are asked to rate the degree to which each statement (e.g., “I found it difficult to relax”) applied to them during the past week on a scale from “Not true” to “Very true.” This measure is widely used by researchers and clinicians for both identifying an individual’s locus of emotional disturbance and measuring an individual’s current state and tracking changes over time (e.g., during treatment) in the three dimensions of depression, anxiety, and stress.
Assessment Administration Type
Self-report
Number of questions
21
Age Range for Administration
8-17
Recommended Frequency of Administration
Weekly
Summary of Scoring and Interpretations
The DASS-Y contains 21 questions scored on a 4-point Likert scale with values from 0 (“Not true”) to 3 (“Very true”). The total score is calculated by summing all item response scores; higher scores are associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety and stress. In addition, subscale scores can be calculated for each of the three subscales by summing their corresponding items. See table below.
Subscale | Corresponding Questions |
Depression | 3, 5, 10, 13, 16, 17, 21 |
Anxiety | 2, 4, 7, 9, 15, 19, 20 |
Stress | 1, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 18 |
Cutoff scores for the DASS-Y are as follows:
| 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+ |
Blueprint Adjustments
N/A
Clinical Considerations
Estimated completion time: 5-8 minutes
There are other versions of the DASS, including the 42-item, 21-item (in English and Spanish), and 10-item versions, all of which are also available on Blueprint.
Clinical decision-making, such as treatment planning, based on specific score profiles should only be made by experienced clinicians who have also conducted a thorough clinical examination.
None of the DASS items address suicidal tendencies, as these items did not align with any scale. Experienced clinicians will recognize the necessity of assessing suicide risk outside of the measure in individuals with severe disturbances.
The DASS is not meant to be a diagnostic tool.
Citation
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