Introduction:

The short version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies (CES-D) Depression Scale is a viable tool for screening depressive symptomatology in the general population, but its factorial invariance for indigenous populations in Latin America has not been reported.

Objective:

To describe the differences in the prevalence of depressive symptomatology and the factorial invariance of the short version of the CES-D scale for the Mexican indigenous population.

Materials and methods:

We conducted a cross-sectional study with a representative sample of 37,165 Mexican adults aged 20 to 59 years. Indigenous identity was determined by self-report of being a speaker of an indigenous language. Eight groups of analysis were created according to gender, literacy, and being indigenous. An exploratory factor analysis was used to describe the prevalence of depressive symptoms as measured by the short version of the CES-D, as well as the configuration factorial invariance of the profiles. The variance-covariance matrices of the pairs of profiles were compared using the modified Mantel test.

Results:

The prevalence of depressive symptoms was 16.8% (95% CI: 13.4-20.3) for indigenous women who could read, 21.3% (95% CI: 15.5% 27.1) for indigenous women who could not read, 8.5% (95% CI: 6.0-11.1) for indigenous men who could read, and 10.4% (95% CI: 5.2-15.6) for indigenous men who could not read. No significant differences in the factorial loads of the profiles were found.

Conclusion:

The prevalence of depressive symptoms in indigenous people is lower than in the non-indigenous population. The factorial invariance of the CES-D scale was high for the indigenous population.

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