Assessment of Mental Health in African American College Students

Mental disorders are often assessed in clinical and research settings in part by questionnaires and inventories like the Depressive Personality Disorder Inventory (DPDI) (Huprich, Barthelemy, and Fine, 1996). Norms for such instruments are often developed using nonrandom convenience sampling and frequently exclude ethnic and racial minority groups due to insufficient representation of such groups in the initial sample. As more members of minority groups seek mental health care, it is important that norms for such groups be established. The purpose of this study was to examine the response characteristics of a sample of African American college students to the DPDI, a commonly used assessment tool for a routinely diagnosed condition. The DPDI is a 41-item inventory that employs a 7-point Likert scale and is answered by paper-and-pencil. Its norms were established on a sample of 89 undergraduates attending a private Catholic university in the Midwest consisting of 32 males and 57 females with a mean age of 19.09 years. The sample was 96% Caucasian. The mean score for the total sample was 127.11 (SD = 33.75) and 124.76 (SD = 35.89) for males and 128.70 (SD = 32.40) for females. In the present study, the DPDI was administered to 225 African American college students enrolled in a personal health class at a historically black university in the Southeast. Data were entered into a personal computer and SPSS used to derive descriptive statistics and run t-tests to compare within group means. This sample consisted of 142 females and 83 males and had a mean age of 19.5 years. The mean score for the total sample was 187.83 (SD = 83.84) and 186.19 (SD = 87.51) for males and 189.46 (SD = 80.16) for females. T-test analysis revealed no significant differences by gender (p = .355) or age (< 19.5 years by > 19.5 years) (p = .895). Apparent differences between scores of the normative sample and those of the African American sample strongly suggest that the DPDI may be of limited value in diagnosing mental health in this group and that novel tools may be needed to address the unique characteristics of this group.