AUTHOR=Dosovitsky Gilly , Kim Erick , Bunge Eduardo L. 

TITLE=Psychometric Properties of a Chatbot Version of the PHQ-9 With Adults and Older Adults

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Digital Health

VOLUME=3

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-health/articles/10.3389/fdgth.2021.645805

DOI=10.3389/fdgth.2021.645805

ISSN=2673-253X

ABSTRACT=<p><bold>Background:</bold> The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) is a brief depression measure that has been validated. A chatbot version of the PHQ-9 would allow the assessment of depressive symptoms remotely, at a large scale and low cost.</p><p><bold>Objective:</bold> The current study aims to: Assess the feasibility of administering the PHQ-9 in a sample of adults and older adults <italic>via</italic> chatbot, report the psychometric properties of and identify the relationship between demographic variables and PHQ-9 total scores.</p><p><bold>Methods:</bold> A sample of 3,902 adults and older adults in the US and Canada were recruited through Facebook from August 2019 to February 2020 to complete the PHQ-9 using a chatbot.</p><p><bold>Results:</bold> A total of 3,895 (99.82%) completed the PHQ-9 successfully. The internal consistency of the PHQ-9 was 0.896 (<italic>p</italic> &lt; 0.05). A one factor structure was found to have good model fit [<italic>X</italic><sup>2</sup> (27, <italic>N</italic> = 1,948) = 365.396, <italic>p</italic> &lt; 0.001; RMSEA = 0.080 (90% CI: 0.073, 0.088); CFI and TLI were 0.925 and 0.900, respectively, and SRMR was 0.039]. All of the demographic characteristics in this study were found to significantly predict PHQ-9 total score, however; their effect was negligible to weak.</p><p><bold>Conclusions:</bold> There was a large sample of adults and older adults were open to completing assessments <italic>via</italic> chatbot including those over 75. The psychometric properties of the chatbot version of the PHQ-9 provide initial support to the utilization of this assessment method.</p>