To contribute to cross-cultural studies, the research used the special cultural context in the Azerbaijani urban population. Despite often being bilingual and speaking two languages (Azerbaijani and Russian), this Azerbaijani urban population were divided into two distinctive language groups with either Azerbaijani or Russian as the first language. A selfreported Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (ZSDS) is established to be a reliable and valid measure for assessment of depressive symptoms, applicable cross-culturally.

ZSDS was translated into Azerbaijani and Russian. Two pilot studies on small samples (n = 30 and n = 45) conducted to improve the scale's acceptability. Reliability study was conducted on a bigger sample of depressed subjects (n = 55) and healthy controls (n = 120). Chronbach's alpha for the total scale, Item-test correlations, alpha if item deleted, and sensitivity and specificity at various cut-off levels were calculated.

Drop-out rate was 83.3% at the first pilot study due to pure comprehension of item 5 and culturally unacceptable wording of item 6. After rewording of the items drope-out reduced to 20% on the second pilot study. on the reliability study Chronbach's alpha for the total scale was 0.8727, and item-test correlations for the most individual items were satisfactory. An optimal cut-off point was 45 pints with sensitivity = 90.91%, specificity = 80.83%.

Reliability of the Zung Self-Reported Depression Scale improved cultural acceptability of the scale in the particular Azerbaijani population context.