Mood and feelings questionnaire-short form (MFQ-SF)

The self-report child short form of the Mood and Feelings Questionnaire [18, 19] was used to assess current depressive symptoms. The MFQ-SF includes 13 items that cover depressive symptoms over the past 2 weeks. It is a widely used instrument for the screening of depressive symptoms in the general population of adolescents, with good psychometric properties. In the present study, the original 13-item MFQ-SF was translated into Italian by bilingual psychologists and then back-translated by two independent translators to verify the equivalence of the translated scale to the original one [20]. An exploratory factorial analysis (Principal Factor Analysis) carried out on the scale confirmed the unidimensional structure; eigenvalues (and percentage of explained variance) of the first three factors were respectively 5.76 (44.3%), 1.19 (9.2%) and 0.96 (7.4%). For the purpose of the present study, a total score was computed. Higher scores indicate greater depression. In this study, Cronbach’s alpha was .887. Angold and colleagues pointed out that, in the short version of the scale, the value of 12 can be considered as a clinical threshold value (cut-off) predictive of depressive symptomatology [18].