2025

Vähäsarja, Luka E. J.; Lipsanen, Jari O.; Kouvonen, Anne M.; Lahelma, Eero T.; Lappalainen, Raimo; Virtanen, Marianna; Lallukka, Tea M.

We conducted the first validation of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21) in Finnish. DASS-21 is a short public domain questionnaire, which presents a way to quickly and effectively screen for mental ill health. We recruited two large samples, one aged 24-45 (N = 3,101 [2,488 women]), and the other aged 60-82 (N = 5,462 [4,473 women]), all employees of the city of Helsinki at inclusion (2017 and 2000-2002). DASS-21 measured depression, anxiety, stress, and general distress reliably among Finnish-speaking adults. It appeared invariant with age and gender as evinced by invariance analyses, latent mean comparisons, and an examination of psychometric properties for the subscales and individual items. The subscales negatively correlated with the Emotional Well-being subscale of the RAND-36, as expected. A comparison of five structural models using confirmatory factor analyses and a robust estimation method (weighted-least-squares method) showed a good fit for a one-factor solution. We discuss the use and interpretation of the DASS-21 as both a measure of specific affective symptoms and unidimensional general distress. We provide future researchers and clinicians with norms and estimates of measurement error among Finnish-speaking adults.