Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) items characteristics among undergraduate students of nineteen Islamic countries

An Arabic version of the second edition of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) in its complete form was developed by Ghareeb (2000). The BDI-II was administered to 18 Islamic groups and the English version of the BDI-II (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) was administered to an additional Pakistani group. Co-efficient alphas were computed for samples of male and female undergraduates recruited from 19 Islamic countries: Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Pakistan (n=600, 270, 479, 841, 943, 780, 781, 356, 230, 360, 333, 590, 735, 275, 291, 298, 300, 706 and 532 respectively). The corrected item-total scale correlations of the BDI-II ranged between .21 and 89, the inventory seems viable in the Arabic context. Its use in cross-cultural studies would be suitable.