Research Article PSYCHOMETRIC EVALUATION OF A MEASURE OF BECK’S NEGATIVE COGNITIVE TRIAD FOR YOUTH: APPLICATIONS FOR AFRICAN–AMERICAN AND CAUCASIAN ADOLESCENTS Leilani Greening, 1n Laura Stoppelbein, 1 Dirk Dhossche, 1 and Wanda Martin 2 A measure of Beck’s negative cognitive triad, the Cognitive Triad for Children (CTI-C), was evaluated for its psychometric properties and utility with a community sample of 880 African–American and Caucasian adolescents. High-school students ranging from 14 to 17 years of age completed the CTI-C, the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) and the Children’s Attributional Style Questionnaire-Revised (CASQ-R) on two occasions 4 months apart. The CTI-C was found to be internally consistent, Cronbach’s a ¼ .90, to have acceptable test-retest reliability, r ¼ .70, and concurrent validity as demon- strated by a significant correlation with the CASQ-R, r ¼.53. A principal factor analysis with promax rotation did not yield support for Beck’s tripartite model of negative cognitions about the self, world, and future but rather yielded three factors with a combination of cognitions from all three domains. African American adolescents who reported more maladaptive cognitions on the CTI-C reported fewer depressive symptoms on the CDI 4 months later compared to their Caucasian counterparts, suggesting some limitation to using the CTI-C to predict depressive symptoms in African–American youth; however, Factor 1 derived from a factor analysis with the sample was more consistent in predicting future symptoms among both African–American and Caucasian adolescents. This factor consisted largely of positively worded items, offering some support for low positive affect as a predictor of depressive symptoms in adolescents. Depression and Anxiety 21:161–169, 2005. & 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc. Key words: depression; adolescents; negative cognitive triad; depressive cognitions; positive af fect Major depressive disorders are among the most common mental health problems in our society and appear to be affecting younger age cohorts than in past generations [Cross-National Collaborative Group, 1992; Lewinsohn et al., 1993; Young et al., 2001]. Point prevalence rates for major depression, as defined in the DSM-IV [American Psychiatric Association, 1994], range from 2 to 4% in adults to as high as 6% among adolescents [Kessler et al., 2001]. Lifetime prevalence rates tend to be higher, with rates reaching as high as 14 to 16% for major depression among adolescent and adult respondents to the National Comorbidity Survey [Kessler, 2002; Kessler et al., 2001]. Although not of sufficient severity to warrant a DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY 21:161–169 (2005) 1 University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, Mississippi 2 University of Alabama n Correspondence to: L. Greening, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, 2500 North State Street, Jackson, MS 39216, USA. E-mail: LGreening@psychiatry.umsmed.edu Received for publication 6 December 2004; Revised 25 March 2005; Accepted 10 May 2005 DOI: 10.1002/da.20073 Published online 20 July 2005 in Wiley InterScience (www. interscience.wiley.com). & & 2005 WILEY-LISS, INC.