Factor structure and internal consistency of the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and the Subjective Vitali
- PDF / 183,320 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 610 x 792 pts Page_size
- 79 Downloads / 192 Views
Open Access
Short report
Factor structure and internal consistency of the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and the Subjective Vitality Scale (VS), and the relationship between them: a study from France Mareï Salama-Younes1, Ali Montazeri*2, Amany Ismaïl3 and Charles Roncin3 Address: 1Laboratory of Social Psychology, Department of Psychology, Rennes II University, Rennes, France, 2Iranian Institute for Health Sciences Research, ACECR, Tehran, Iran and 3Laboratory of Sociology and Anthropology, Departement of Sociology, Rennes II University, France Email: Mareï Salama-Younes - [email protected]; Ali Montazeri* - [email protected]; Amany Ismaïl - [email protected]; Charles Roncin - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 5 March 2009 Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 2009, 7:22
doi:10.1186/1477-7525-7-22
Received: 15 October 2008 Accepted: 5 March 2009
This article is available from: http://www.hqlo.com/content/7/1/22 © 2009 Salama-Younes et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: The objectives of this study were to test the factor structure and internal consistency of the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and the Subjective Vitality Scale (VS) in elderly French people, and to test the relationship between these two questionnaires. Methods: Using a standard 'forward-backward' translation procedure, the English language versions of the two instruments (i.e. the 12-item General Health Questionnaire and the Subjective Vitality Scale) were translated into French. A sample of adults aged 58–72 years then completed both questionnaires. Internal consistency was assessed by Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The factor structures of the two instruments were extracted by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Finally, the relationship between the two instruments was assessed by correlation analysis. Results: In all, 217 elderly adults participated in the study. The mean age of the respondents was 61.7 (SD = 6.2) years. The mean GHQ-12 score was 17.4 (SD = 8.0), and analysis showed satisfactory internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha coefficient = 0.78). The mean VS score was 22.4 (SD = 7.4) and its internal consistency was found to be good (Cronbach's alpha coefficient = 0.83). While CFA showed that the VS was uni-dimensional, analysis for the GHQ-12 demonstrated a good fit not only to the two-factor model (positive vs. negative items) but also to a three-factor model. As expected, there was a strong and significant negative correlation between the GHQ-12 and the VS (r = -0.71, P < 0.001). Conclusion: The results showed that the French versions of the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and the Subjective Vitality Scale (VS) are reliable measures of psychological distress and vitality.
Data Loading...
