Figure 2.

Illustration that scores on any manifest measure of depression do not only operationally assess DSM-based depressive symptoms variance. Rather, the manifest depression measure is comprised of different sources of variance that likely correspond to various hierarchies in proposed latent dimensional hierarchical models of psychopathology (e.g., Hankin et al., 2016; Kotov et al., 2017), including a general psychopathology dimension (e.g, p factor), specific internalizing dimension, then specific depression symptoms as well as processes unrelated to the core psychopathological phenomenon, and other unspecified error. This is meant to illustrate that a single manifest score on a depression assessment does not represent a singular property, but rather is comprised of various latent constructs and processes that can be disambiguated to relate meaningfully to other risks and outcomes that can be studied via construct validation procedures in a nomological network (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955).