Assessment of the revised Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scales among adolescents and adults with severe mental illness

•The original DERS-36 and the three abridged versions of the DERS, namely, DERS-16, DERS-18, and DERS-SF, have adequate goodness-of-fit indices when examining their factor structure among adolescents and adults.•Measurement invariance testing indicated that the factor structure and factor loadings of the DERS-16, DERS-18, and DERS-SF scales were similar across the developmental stages of adolescence and adulthood.•Only the DERS-SF had scalar invariance, in that the group averages/means on DERS-SF for adolescents and adults can be compared. The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) comprising 36 items has been widely used across age, gender, psychopathology, language, and culture. Recently several alternative abridged forms have been introduced, namely, the DERS-16 (Bjureberg et al. 2016), the DERS-SF (Kaufman et al. 2016), and the DERS-18 (Victor and Klonsky, 2016), each composed of 16 or 18 items, to provide researchers and clinicians with a shorter measure of emotion dysregulation. However, no study to date has directly compared the psychometrics of these alternative forms. In the present study, using confirmatory factor analysis we first examined the factor structure of the four models of the DERS in two inpatient samples of 636 adolescents in the age-range of 12–17 years (M = 15.33, SD = 1.43), and 1807 adults in the age-range of 18–76 years (M = 34.86, SD = 14.63) with severe mental illness. Next, measurement invariance was tested comparing the two age groups across the four models of DERS. Only the DERS-SF established metric and scalar measurement invariance. Findings suggest that the factor structure of the original and the abridged models of DERS have acceptable fit, however only DERS-SF had equivalence of factor loadings and item intercepts across adolescents and adults.