Factorial Validation of Children's Depression Inventory in Primary Schools in Nigeria

Background/Objective: The rate of feelings of depression among primary school children in Nigeria is quite alarming. This kind of feeling affects negatively the children's academic activities in school. Children's depression inventory (CDI) has been validated by researchers using children of several developed countries but none has been done using Nigerian children. Thus, this study carried out factorial validation of CDI in terms of both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis using Nigerian children within the age of 3-10 years. Method: The factor analysis approach was used for the study with a sample of 363 pupils. Kovacs (1992) 27-item CDI was adopted and validated. Principal component analysis with varimax rotation was used for the determination of the factors of the CDI. After that, the extracted factors were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis to determine the model fit for the data using International Business Machines, Statistical Package for Social Sciences, Analysis of a Moment Structures (IBM SPSS AMOS). Results: The analysis showed that the items of CDI had a good internal consistency reliability index. The data also had a good model fit with confirmatory factor index (CFI) of 0.973 and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) of 0.048. Conclusion: CDI is a stable instrument that can be used to diagnose feelings of depression among children.