The Children Depression Inventory as Predictor of Social and Scholastic Competence

Abstract

Summary This work analyzes the relationship between the different CDI factors, nonsocialized personality traits as measured by the Psychoticism and Antisocial Behavior EPQ scales, academic achievement, and general intelligence. Participants in this study were 678 8th-grade Basic General Education students (secondary), of whom 315 were boys and 363 girls, with an average mean age of 13 years. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the CDI performed yielded four orthogonal factors. The third factor (CDI-III; Incompetence/Maladjustment) was integrated by items related to social and academic maladjusted behavior. The CDI was negatively correlated with academic achievement, although this correlation disappeared when performing partial correlations controlling for CDI-III. A regression analysis further corroborated that CDI-III was the only CDI factor related to low academic achievement. The results also show that the CDI-III and Introversion for boys, and the CDI-III and Neuroticism for girls, were the most predictive variables of low academic achievement.