The Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21)

The DASS-21 (Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995) explores distress experienced in the last 7 days. The measure contains 21 items that are scored on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (did not apply to me at all) to 3 (applied to me very much, or most of the time) with a total score between 0 and 63. The DASS-21 has three subscales; Depression, Anxiety, and Stress.

The internal consistency for the three subscales is strong with Cronbach's alphas ranging from 0.87 to 0.94 and the scale also has good concurrent validity as it has moderate to strong correlations with other measures such as the Beck Depression Inventory, Beck Anxiety Inventory (Antony et al., 1998), and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Henry and Crawford, 2005). The DASS-21 has displayed excellent internal reliability within non-clinical populations with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.93 for the overall scale (Henry and Crawford, 2005).