Identifying and Measuring Depression in Older Cancer Patients

participate in a brief interview

10-16 patients will review draft items and participate in a cognitive interview. 15 older patients will complete the draft measure in order to generate preliminary psychometric data. All interviews will be audio recorded and transcribed by Ubiqus Transcription Company. The audio recordings are uploaded through Ubiqus's secure server and the transcribed audio is returned to the research staff within 48 hours.

The draft measure (approximately 35 items, described above) will be administered to a large sample of older cancer patients (n=150) to generate data to evaluate preliminary psychometric properties (item properties including measures of central tendency, skewness/kurtosis, internal consistency, test/re-test reliability, and construct validity (i.e, convergent and discriminant).and known group differences) to further winnow the measure to include approximately 20 items.