Investigating the psychometric properties of the Patient Health Questionnaire for Adolescents (PHQ-A) and Center for Epidemiologic Studies - Depression Scale for Children (CES-DC) among young adolescents in South Africa (dataset)

<p dir="ltr">This dataset accompanies the study titled “Investigating the psychometric properties of the Patient Health Questionnaire for Adolescents (PHQ-A) and Center for Epidemiologic Studies - Depression Scale for Children (CES-DC) among young adolescents in South Africa,” submitted to PLOS ONE. The dataset was created to assess the reliability and validity of two adolescent depression screening tools—the Patient Health Questionnaire for Adolescents (PHQ-A) and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale for Children (CES-DC)—in a South African context.</p><p dir="ltr">Data collection occurred in two phases, between February and July 2022. First, 42 adolescents aged 10–14 years participated in cognitive testing focus groups to assess comprehension and cultural relevance of the screening tool items. Second, a sample of 500 adolescents from 10 schools completed a tablet-based survey containing socio-demographic variables and the adapted PHQ-A and CES-DC items. A subset of 123 participants completed a clinical diagnostic interview using the MINI-KID depression module, and another subset of 145 completed the survey again after two weeks to assess test–retest reliability.</p><p dir="ltr">The dataset includes anonymized quantitative data in CSV format and corresponding codebooks. Variables include socio-demographic information, item-level responses to PHQ-A and CES-DC scales, and diagnostic outcomes from the MINI-KID interviews. Sensitive information has been removed, and all data were de-identified prior to publication.</p><p dir="ltr">Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the University of Cape Town Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC: 565/2020) and the Western Cape Education Department (20211018-6776), and informed consent and assent were secured from all participants and guardians. The dataset is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license to facilitate transparency, replication, and secondary analysis. Users are requested to cite both the dataset and the associated publication when reusing these data.</p>