Parents' depression was assessed with the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Inventory (CESD; Radloff, 1977), a scale designed to measure depressive symptoms in community populations. The CESD is a widely used, self-report, four-point Likert type measure. Parents were asked to report how often they experienced 20 depressive symptoms (e.g., poor appetite, feeling sad, inability to concentrate) during the past week with responses including rarely or none, some or a little of the time (1–2 days), occasionally or a moderate amount of the time (3–4 days), or most or all of the time (5–7 days). The scale has high internal consistency (Radloff, 1977), and strong test–retest reliability (Boyd, Weissman, Thompson, & Myers, 1982; Ensel, 1982). Internal consistency in the present study was .90 for mothers and .87 for fathers. Scores on the CES-D ranged from 0 to 37 for both parents (M=7.62, SD=6.87 for fathers, M=8.35, SD=7.22 for mothers).
