Eighty consecutive attenders (M age = 75 years) in a primary care group practice associated with a teaching hospital in New York were assessed for depression using a self-administered questionnaire, the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS), and a rater-administered interview, the Short-CARE. The sample was 75% female and 85% black or Hispanic. The response rate of completed interviews was 65% for the Zung SDS and 100% for the Short-CARE. Among the reasons indicated by subjects for not filling out the Zung SDS were visual problems (n = 13, 28%), illiteracy (n = 4, 9%), and lack of motivation/wanted it read to them (n = 16, 34%). Additionally, using the Primary Care Physicians' Questionnaire (PCPQ), results from the Short-CARE and the Zung SDS were compared to primary care physicians' judgments regarding the presence of depression in these patients. The convergent validity coefficient for the Zung SDS with the PCPQ was .65 (kappa = .29); the comparable coefficients for the PCPQ and the Short-CARE Depression Scale were .73 and .46 respectively.
Aged Depression