General Behavior Inventory
The General Behavior Inventory is a 73-question psychological self-report assessment tool designed by Richard Depue and colleagues to identify the presence and severity of manic and depressive moods in adults, as well as to assess for cyclothymia. It is one of the most widely used psychometric tests for measuring the severity of bipolar disorder and the fluctuation of symptoms over time. The GBI is intended to be administered for adult populations; however, it has been adapted into versions that allow for juvenile populations, as well as a short version that allows for it to be used as a screening test.
Versions
General Behavior Inventory (GBI)
The GBI was originally made as a self-report instrument for college students and adults to use to describe their own history of mood symptoms. The original item set included clinical characteristics and associated features in addition to the diagnostic symptoms of manic and depressive states in the current versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The first set of 69 items was increased to 73, with the final version having 73 mood items and 6 additional questions to check the validity of responses. The self report version of the GBI has been used in an extensive program of research, accruing evidence of many facets of validity. Because of its length and high reading level, there also have been many efforts to develop short forms of the GBI.7 Up 7 Down Inventory (7U7D)
The 7 Up-7 Down is a 14-item measure of manic and depressive tendencies that was carved from the full length GBI. This version is designed to be applicable for both youths and adults, and to improve separation between both mania and depressive conditions. It was developed via factor analysis from nine separate samples pooled into two age groups, ensuring applicability for use in youth and adults.A sleep scale also has been carved from the GBI, using the seven items that ask about anything directly related to sleep.
Parent report on the GBI (P-GBI)
The P-GBI is an adaptation of the GBI, consisting of 73 Likert scale items rated on a scale from 0 to 3. It consists of two scales: a depressive symptoms and a hypomanic/biphasic symptoms.Parent short forms
Again, due to the length of the full version, several short forms have been built and tested in multiple samples that may be more convenient to use in clinical work. These include 10 item mania, two alternate 10 item depression forms, and the seven item Sleep scale. All have performed as well or better than the self-report version when completed by an adult familiar with the youth's behavior.The PGBI-10M is a brief version of the PGBI that was validated for clinical use for patients presenting with a variety of different diagnoses, including frequent comorbid conditions. It is administered to parents for them to rate their children between ages 5–17. The 10 items include symptoms such as elated mood, high energy, irritability and rapid changes in mood and energy as indicators of potential [bipolar disorder in children|juvenile bipolar disorder]. The PhenX Toolkit uses this instrument as its child protocol for Hypomania/Mania Symptoms.
Teacher report on the GBI
One study had a large sample of teachers complete the GBI to describe the mood and behavior of youths age 5 to 18 years old. The results indicated that there were many items that teachers did not have an opportunity to observe the behavior, and others that teachers often chose to skip. Even after shortening the item list to those that teachers could report about, the validity results were modest even though the internal consistency reliability was high. The results suggested that it was challenging for teachers to tell the difference between hypomanic symptoms and symptoms attributable to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which is much more common in the classroom. The results aligned with findings from a large meta-analysis that teacher report had the lowest average validity across all mania scales compared to adolescent or parent report on the same scales. Based on these results, current recommendations are to concentrate on parent and youth report, and not use teacher report as a way of measuring hypomanic symptoms in youths.Psychometric properties
The GBI has been used extensively in research, including clinical samples, college students, longitudinal, treatment, and other studies. However, no normative data exist to calibrate scores in the general population.Reliability
The GBI has very good reliability.| Criterion | Rating | Explanation with references |
| Norms | Adequate | Multiple convenience samples and research studies, including both clinical and nonclinical samples |
| Internal consistency | Excellent; too good for some contexts | Cronbach's alphas routinely over.94 for both scales, suggesting that scales could be shortened for many uses |
| Inter-rater reliability | Not applicable | Designed originally as a self-report scale; parent and youth report correlate about the same as cross-informant scores correlate in general |
| Test-retest reliability | Good | r =.73 over 15 weeks. Evaluated in initial studies, with data also showing high stability in clinical trials |
| Repeatability | Not published | No published studies formally checking repeatability |