Rapid assessment of well-being: the Short Depression-Happiness Scale (SDHS)

The purpose of this paper was: first, to develop the short six-item form of the Depression-Happiness Scale; and second, to examine evidence of reliability and validity for the short form. Three studies are presented. In the first study, principal components analysis is reported and used to select six items to compose the short form of the scale. In the second study, re-analyses of data from three previous studies are presented which confirm that the short scale has good psychometric properties of internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity. In the third study, the short form is found to have a single component structure and convergent validity with measures of depression, happiness and personality.