Capturing additional variance in impact of adolescent depression from free text: proof of concept and preliminary results

Parent free-text in adolescents’ DAWBA depression reports adds incremental information about depression impact beyond structured symptom scales, with the largest gains in functioning-related domains.

• Why it matters: Structured symptom scales may miss adolescent-specific domains tied to real-world impact, and most evidence has relied on adult samples rather than quantifying these missing elements.
• What they did: In a preregistered study, DAWBA depression free text was analyzed with large language models to extract a taxonomy of 80 outcomes, then incremental information was estimated via sequential residual stacking across symptom sum-scores (S), item responses (Q), and text representations (T).
• The result: In parent-report data (n = 106), text-derived representations (T) contributed additional information not captured by structured symptom-scale measures, while no such evidence emerged in adolescent self-reports (n = 153).

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