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NPE prep sample · Study page · Assessment · A sample of the National Psychology Exam preparation inside PsychLog. Every subscription and free trial has all of it.

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Try these before you read. A wrong guess still helps, because you then read for the answer. These are 2 of the page's 5 quick checks. All 5 are at the end of the page, with model answers to compare.

Assessment

DASS: Depression Anxiety Stress Scales

What the DASS measures and does not measure, how the DASS-21 is scored and read against each set of cut-offs, what the severity ratings mean, the Australian percentile norms, and how the three scales are read with care.

Quick check

Answer each one in your own words, then open the model answer to compare. Signed in, your answers are kept and marked, and the plan uses them.

  1. 1.A psychologist scores a 39-year-old man's DASS-21 by hand. His anxiety sum is 5, which the scoring sheet on the desk rates as mild. A colleague doubles it to 10 and, from the manual's table, calls it moderate. Which severity rating is correct?

    Model answer

    Both readings are correct on their own sheet: the desk sheet prints DASS-21 cut-offs already halved, and the manual's cut-offs apply to doubled scores, and at an anxiety score of 5 the two tables disagree. The psychologist would record the raw score, the doubled score and which cut-offs were used, so that anyone reading the file can see how the severity rating was reached, and not let the severity rating carry weight it cannot bear: the cut-offs are arbitrary points on a continuum, and a score on a boundary tells the psychologist to look at the interview, not to argue over the word. Where a single severity rating is needed, the manual's is the reference.

  2. 2.A 44-year-old man seeking a report for a workers compensation claim returns a DASS-21 with all three scores in the extremely severe range. In the interview he is composed, describes a full weekly routine, and answers most questions with a brief "as bad as it gets". What does the psychologist make of the scores?

    Model answer

    The options a reasonable psychologist would weigh are to report the scores as found, to confront him with the mismatch, or to treat the scores as one source among several. The DASS is transparent, a respondent can exaggerate as easily as minimise, and it has no lie scale, so the scores cannot settle the question either way. The psychologist would report the scores with the interview observations beside them, not diagnose from them, and, because bias is a live possibility in a compensation context, consider an instrument with validity scales before drawing any conclusion about severity.

  3. 3.A 28-year-old man completes the DASS-21 each week during treatment for stress at work. His doubled Stress score falls from 30 to 20 between two consecutive weeks, and he says nothing has improved and that the week just gone was worse than the one before. What does the psychologist do with the score?

    Model answer

    The DASS asks about the past seven days, so the first check is whether he completed the form for that week and with care, and the second is which items moved. If the form was completed properly, the score and his account describe the same week from two angles, and the psychologist would put them side by side in the session rather than choosing one: what the items that fell were about, and what made the week feel worse. A single week's drop is not treated as improvement in the treatment, and a single week's account is not treated as a failure of the measure; the trend over several weeks is what the tracking is for.

  4. 4.A psychologist seeing a 46-year-old woman with limited English has a Vietnamese translation of the DASS-21 downloaded from the DASS website, and an interpreter who could read the English items aloud. What does the psychologist do?

    Model answer

    There are three options: use the translation, have the interpreter read the English items, or leave the DASS out and take the history through the interpreter. Reading the English items aloud through an interpreter produces a different instrument each time it is done, so that option is set aside. The translation is a stable form, but it was made by others and the developers do not guarantee its quality, and the cut-offs and the Australian percentile norms come from English-language samples. So the psychologist could either use the translation as a repeatable baseline and report that a translated form was used and that the norms do not apply to it, or take the history without it. Either is reasonable; scoring the translation as if it were the English form is not.

  5. 5.A 22-year-old woman's raw DASS-21 depression score is 9. To tell her GP how she compares with the Australian population, the psychologist doubles it to 18 and enters 18 into the percentile-norms program. What is the consequence?

    Model answer

    The percentile norms take the raw DASS-21 score, with a maximum of 21 on each scale, so entering 18 places her against the wrong distribution and returns a percentile that is far too high. The raw score of 9 should be entered, and against the 18 to 24 norms, which are the less certain of the two age groups. The doubling rule belongs to the manual's cut-offs and to published DASS data; the psychologist reports the percentile from the raw score and the severity rating from the doubled score, and says which is which.