Pergamon PII: S0021-9630(96)00035-2 J. Child Psychol. Psychial. Vol. 37, No. 7, pp. 879-883, 19% Published by Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0021-9630/96 $15.00 + 0.00 Self-Reported Depressed Mood in Russian and U.K. Schoolchildren. A Research Note Tony Charman Subdepartment of Clinical Health Psychology, University College London, U.K. Irina Pervova Psychology Department, St Petersburg State University, Russia Self-reported depressive symptoms were compared between two samples of school- children — one in Russia and one in the U.K. Self-reported symptoms were significantly higher in the Russian sample on both the Child Depression Inventory (CDI) and the Depression Self-Rating Scale (DSRS). Age and gender effects were found for the Russian sample on the DSRS but not the CDI, with younger children and girls scoring more highly. The possible explanations for the elevated self-report of depressive symptoms in the Russian sample are considered. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Keywords: Depression, school-children, cross-culture Introduction A considerable amount of research has focused on the prevalence of depressive symptoms in children and adolescents in Western societies. Normative data have been collected on the general population in America and Western Europe (for reviews see Angold, 1988; Fleming & Offord, 1990; Harrington, 1992). Self-report instru- ments, such as the Child Depression Inventory (CDI; Kovacs & Beck, 1977) and the Depression Self-rating Scale (DSRS; Birleson, 1981), have been shown to be relatively robust, in terms of reliability and validity, in identifying the level of depressive symptomatology in general child and adolescent populations, as well as in clinic populations (Asarnow & Carlson, 1985; Birleson, 1981; Birleson et al., 1987; Carlson & Cantwell, 1980; Finch et al., 1985; Firth & Chaplin, 1987; Fundudis et al., 1991; Helsel & Matson, 1984; Saylor et al., 1984; Smucker et al., 1986). Whilst the use of different cut-off points for identification of psychiatric morbidity has been employed in different studies, and there have been criticisms of the reliance on self-report measures only for such an exercise (Fleming & Offord, 1990), prevalence figures for self-reported psychiatric morbidity in the general child and adolescent population of between 5 and 10% commonly have been obtained (Doerfler et al, 1988; Edelsohn et al., 1992; Forehand et al., 1991; Garrison et al., 1989; Kolvin et al., 1991; Kovacs, 1983; Saylor et al., 1984; Smucker et al., 1986). When formal psychiatric diagnostic instruments are employed, pre- valence figures in Western samples have been around Requests for reprints to: Tony Charman, Subdepartment of Clinical Health Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London WCIE 6BT, U.K. 1-2% (Anderson et al., 1987; Kashani & Simmonds, 1979). Research has also shown that depressed mood is not always a developmentally transient phenomenon, but remains relatively stable, in at least a sub-population of children, for 4 or even 6 months (Charman, 1994; Edelsohn et al., 1992). More recently, attention has turned towards the question of whether the prevalence or nature of depressive symptoms differs between children and adolescents from different countries and different cultures. Studies comparing American, Australian and British populations have identified similar levels of depressive morbidity in different Western populations (King et al., 1989; Ollendick et al., 1989; Ollendick & Yule, 1990). Research which has studied non-Western samples is considerably more scarce. In one recent study, Dong et al. (1994) found levels of self-reported depressive symptoms, as measured by the CDI, in Chinese children and adolescents that were similar to those reported by studies of Western populations. However, in a recent study which employed the CDI with Egyptian schoolchildren, considerably elevated levels of depressive symptoms were found (Ghareeb & Beshai, 1989). In contrast, a study which directly compared depression (measured by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale: CES-D; Schoenbach et al., 1982) and suicidal intent in school- children in Texas with schoolchildren in Mexico, higher levels of both depression and suicidal intent were found in the American sample (Roberts & Chen, 1995). Within Eastern Europe, a body of work examining the prevalence and course of depression and other psycho- pathology in schoolchildren and adolescents exists (e.g. Bomba & Kurzydlo, 1990; Bomba et al., 1986; Siewierska et al., 1993). However, the standardized instruments employed differ from those used in research 879