Assessment of the revised Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scales among adolescents and adults with severe mental illness

Authors

Ruby Charak, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Brianna M. Byllesby, Summa Health Traumatic Stress Center
Christopher J. Fowler, Baylor College of Medicine
Carla Sharp, The University of Houston
Jon D. Elhai, The University of Toledo
B. Christopher Frueh, University of Hawaii

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2019

Abstract

The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) comprising 36 items has been widely used across age, gender, psychopathology, language, and culture. Recently several alternative abridged forms have been introduced, namely, the DERS-16 (Bjureberg et al. 2016), the DERS-SF (Kaufman et al. 2016), and the DERS-18 (Victor and Klonsky, 2016), each composed of 16 or 18 items, to provide researchers and clinicians with a shorter measure of emotion dysregulation. However, no study to date has directly compared the psychometrics of these alternative forms. In the present study, using confirmatory factor analysis we first examined the factor structure of the four models of the DERS in two inpatient samples of 636 adolescents in the age-range of 12–17 years (M = 15.33, SD = 1.43), and 1807 adults in the age-range of 18–76 years (M = 34.86, SD = 14.63) with severe mental illness. Next, measurement invariance was tested comparing the two age groups across the four models of DERS. Only the DERS-SF established metric and scalar measurement invariance. Findings suggest that the factor structure of the original and the abridged models of DERS have acceptable fit, however only DERS-SF had equivalence of factor loadings and item intercepts across adolescents and adults.

Comments

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Original published version available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2019.04.010.

Recommended Citation

Charak, R., Byllesby, B. M., Fowler, J. C., Sharp, C., Elhai, J. D., & Frueh, B. C. (2019). Assessment of the revised Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scales among adolescents and adults with severe mental illness. Psychiatry research, 279, 278–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2019.04.010

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

Psychiatry Research

DOI

10.1016/j.psychres.2019.04.010