Identifying psychological distress data available in nationally representative surveys: A scoping review and case study of Australian surveys

TL;DR

This paper reviews Australian surveys measuring psychological distress, providing a database to help researchers find and use these datasets more efficiently.

Contribution

The novel contribution is a systematically compiled metadata database of psychological distress datasets in Australia, enabling easier data discovery and integration.

Findings

283 datasets from 41 studies were identified, with the K10 scale being the most commonly used distress instrument.

Surveys often included demographics and socioeconomic data but underrepresented youth, Indigenous people, and those with disabilities.

The metadata database promotes data sharing and can be replicated for other public health topics.

Abstract

Mental health data are crucial for understanding trends in psychological distress. This scoping review aimed to identify and describe surveys of representative samples of the Australian household population that measured psychological distress, and to provide a case study illustrating how datasets can be systematically summarized to assist researchers to more easily identify available datasets.

We systematically searched PubMed and data archives for surveys state or nationally representative of the Australian household population that assessed psychological distress.

We provide a searchable metadata database characterizing 283 identified datasets from 41 studies (25 cross-sectional, 16 longitudinal) conducted between 1989 and 2023. Thirty-nine psychological distress instruments were used, with the Kessler Psychological Distress scale (K10) [1] most common (n = 114 datasets). Surveys also frequently measured demographics, physical health, and socioeconomic information. Stratified random sampling of geographic areas was the most common sampling frame, and adults the most frequently sampled group. There was notably less representation of important subgroups of the population, including youth, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and people with disabilities, despite evidence of high distress prevalence in these groups.

This review provides valuable metadata summarizing available psychological distress datasets, including information on sampling designs, instrumentation, and covariates. This metadata is available to other researchers, enabling efficient identification of relevant datasets, promoting data sharing, and supporting future data integration. This method for systematically compiling metadata can be replicated for data related to other topics important to public health to facilitate greater data utilization.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00127-025-02981-6.

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