Question pretext
During last 12 months, have you experienced any of the following…
For this set of questions, the interviewer must read out a series of symptoms and determine if the respondent had any of those symptoms in the last 12 months. The point of asking symptom-related questions is to screen those individuals who might have a specific health condition or disease. Because there could be a number of symptoms that characterise a given health condition, and because some symptoms may be common to different conditions, it is important that the interviewer probe for each symptom to see whether the respondent may have an active disease. It is also important that the time period for the symptoms (in the last 12 months) be clearly understood by the respondent and not confused with other time frames used in this section (such as "ever" and "the last 2 weeks").
Literal question
During last 12 months, have you had a period lasting several days when you felt sad, empty or depressed?
Categories
| Value |
Category |
| 1 |
Yes |
| 5 |
No |
| 8 |
Do not know |
| Sysmiss |
|
Warning: these figures indicate the number of cases found in the data file. They cannot be interpreted as summary statistics of the population of interest.
Interviewer instructions
The emphasis is on a period that lasted several days (not just one or two days). The interviewer might need to prompt for a number of words that may be equivalent to the symptoms “sad, empty or depressed” – such as “blue”, “tearful”, “with no feelings inside”, “down in the dumps”, “low”, “rock bottom” or “gloomy”.
