The Psychometric Properties of the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6) in an Epidemiological Sample of Canadian Youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This study (1) describes the distribution of Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6) scores in an epidemiological sample of youth, (2) reports its item correlations and internal consistency reliability, (3) tests for measurement invariance by age (youth vs. adults) and sex, and (4) examines its predictive power for past-year psychiatric disorders. METHOD: = 2010) from the Canadian Community Health Survey-Mental Health who completed the K6 were included. Past-year psychiatric disorders were measured using the World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview 3.0 (WHO-CIDI). Polychoric correlation matrices and ordinal reliability coefficients were calculated to assess internal consistency of the K6, and confirmatory factor analysis was used to test for measurement invariance. Area under the curves (AUCs) were computed to determine the extent to which the K6 predicted a positive screen on the WHO-CIDI. RESULTS: K6 scores showed a J-shaped distribution, with >50% of youth having scores ≤3. Item and total scores were higher for females versus males. Item correlations were robust (0.31-0.78) and internal consistency was high (α = 0.86). Full measurement invariance was demonstrated between youth and adults, as well as between male and female youth. The K6 was a strong predictor of major depressive episode (AUC = 0.848), generalized anxiety disorder (AUC = 0.847), and bipolar disorder (AUC = 0.853). CONCLUSIONS: The K6 is a valid and reliable measure of psychological distress among youth. Its brevity and robust predictive power for psychiatric disorder confirm its utility in clinical and community settings to identify youth needing comprehensive psychiatric assessment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".