The methods of improving cultural sensitivity of depression scales for use among global indigenous populations: a systematic scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cultural adaptation of psychometric measures has become a process aimed at increasing acceptance, reliability, and validity among specific Indigenous populations. We present a systematic scoping review to: (1) identify the depression scales that have been culturally adapted for use among Indigenous populations worldwide, (2) globally report on the methods used in the cultural adaptation of those scales, and (3) describe the main features of those cultural adaptation methods. We included articles published from inception to April 2021, including 3 levels of search terms: Psychometrics, Indigenous, and Depression. The search was carried out in the Ovid Medline, PubMed, Embase, Global Health, PsycINFO, and CINAHL databases, following PRISMA guidelines. We identified 34 reports on processes of cultural adaptation that met the criteria. The scales were adapted for use among Indigenous populations from Africa, Australia, Asia, North America, and Latin America. The most common scales that underwent adaptation were the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), and the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Methods of adaptation involved a revision of the measures' cultural appropriateness, standard/transcultural translation, revision of the administration process, and inclusion of visual supports. Culturally safe administration of scales was reported in some studies. To come to a consensus on most appropriate methods of improving cultural safety of psychometric measurement, most studies utilized qualitative methods or mixed methods to understand the specific community's needs. Revision of linguistic equivalence and cultural relevance of content, culturally safe administration procedures, qualitative methods, and participatory research were key features of developing safe culturally adapted measures for depressive symptoms among Indigenous populations. While for comparability, uniform scales would be ideal as mental health evaluations, an understanding of the cultural impact of measurements and local depression expressions would benefit the process of developing culturally sensitive psychometric scales. PROSPERO registration ID: CRD42023391439.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".