Demographic influences and suggested cut-scores for the Beck Depression Inventory in a non-clinical Spanish speaking population from the US-Mexico border region.

The Beck Depression Inventory-I (BDI-I) is a self-report measure of depressive symptomatology that is widely used in both research and clinical settings. While the Spanish language version of the BDI-I is frequently used in the USA, there are currently no available guidelines to determine depressive symptomatology base rates in Spanish speaking populations using this instrument. In the present study, base rates of depressive symptoms and demographic influences on the BDI-I were measured in a non-clinical Spanish speaking population from the US-Mexico border region. A sample of 198 neurologically normal Spanish speaking individuals, mostly of Mexican decent, completed the BDI-I as part of a larger neuropsychological norming study. The results indicated that while there were no effects of age or education on overall BDI-I scores, those with lower education tended to report higher severity of individual symptoms. Consistent with findings in other populations, women endorsed a greater number of depressive symptoms. Therefore separate cut-scores were derived for men and women to represent these differences. Future research should assess the impact of acculturation and socioeconomic stressors on the BDI scores in this mostly immigrant population.

Demographically corrected norms for the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-revised and Hopkins Verbal Learning Test-revised in monolingual Spanish speakers from the U.S.-Mexico border region.

The large number of primary Spanish speakers both in the United States and the world makes it imperative that appropriate neuropsychological assessment instruments be available to serve the needs of these populations. In this article we describe the norming process for Spanish speakers from the U.S.-Mexico border region on the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-revised and the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test-revised. We computed the rates of impairment that would be obtained by applying the original published norms for these tests to raw scores from the normative sample, and found substantial overestimates compared to expected rates. As expected, these overestimates were most salient at the lowest levels of education, given the under-representation of poorly educated subjects in the original normative samples. Results suggest that demographically corrected norms derived from healthy Spanish-speaking adults with a broad range of education, are less likely to result in diagnostic errors. At minimum, demographic corrections for the tests in question should include the influence of literacy or education, in addition to the traditional adjustments for age. Because the age range of our sample was limited, the norms presented should not be applied to elderly populations.

Neuropsychological comparisons of Spanish-speaking participants from the U.S.-Mexico border region versus Spain.

Two samples of participants from the U.S.-Mexico Borderland (N = 185) versus Spain (N = 205) were compared on 16 Spanish-language neuropsychological measures. In most measures the two samples obtained similar results. There were some significant main effects of place of birth and some significant interactions between education and place of birth. Differences between the samples diminished with increasing levels of education. Within the Borderland sample, percent of life span spent in the U.S. and bilingual status were correlated with performance in some tests. Increased percent of life span spent in the U.S. was negatively correlated with performance on a Spanish word-generation task, and positively correlated with performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Bilingual Borderland participants performed significantly better than monolingual speakers in learning a list of words. We suggest that the most likely causes for the observed interaction effects are documented regional differences in early SES-related nutrition, medical care, quality of educational experiences, and general socioeconomic conditions.