Social-cognitive processing and depressive symptoms in children: A comparison of measures

We assessed aspects of the reliability and validity of three measures of socialcognitive processing in children that have been developed to investigate the relations of such processes to childhood depression: the Children's Attributional Style Questionnaire (CASQ), the Children's Negative Cognitive Error Questionnaire (CNCEQ), and the Common Beliefs Inventory for Students (CBIS). In an unselected sample of 61 children, aged 8 to 12, the internal consistencies of the total scores on the CNCEQ and the CBIS were good; for the CASQ, it was only moderate. Internal consistencies of all subscale scores were inadequate. Despite this, several subscale and total scores were significantly associated with depressive symptoms, and the measures were generally correlated with each other. Although these data are encouraging concerning the role of social-cognitive processing in childhood depression, the field needs to develop psychometrically stronger measures and to test the role of social cognition in prospective studies of depression.This study was supported in part by a grant from the Spencer Foundation Awards to Young Scholars Program to the first author. The authors would like to express their thanks to Deborah Long for secretarial assistance, and to W. Edward Craighead, John Curry, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this article.