USC School of Social Work postdoctoral fellow Patricia Lee King has published a literature review on the validity of postpartum depression screening across socioeconomic groups in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.

King evaluated how closely screening tools used to measure postpartum depression adhered to the standard definition of the disorder, as well as the potential bias that could be introduced by those tools when conducting studies with women of low socioeconomic status.

She identified 20 research articles published between January 1980 and January 2010 that addressed the validity of four specific assessment tools: the Beck Depression Inventory, the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and the Postpartum Depression Screening Scale. Only eight of the articles explicitly included women of low socioeconomic status, and only three studies directly evaluated issues of validity.

King found that these screening tools lack the comprehensive evaluation and testing needed to support their use with socioeconomically diverse populations, which may result in missed opportunities to identify postpartum depression.

As a result of her findings, King recommended an alternate approach to screening for postpartum depression among all women that takes into account their unique developmental and environmental contexts.