The Beck Depression Inventory: normative data and problems with generalizability.

A frequency distribution of Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) scores for 484 adult family practice patients was generated to assist researchers with cutoff score decisions and sample size calculations. The question of generalizability was addressed by comparing three primary care BDI studies. Large between-study differences in the frequency of elevated BDI scores remind us that the use of normative data from another setting is second choice to standardization using the population in question.