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 instrum...

Materials and Methods: The universe of the study consisted of a total of 8407 students enrolled as firstor third-year students of a university. The study sample was determined by using the “sampling size where the population in universe is known” formula. The study questionnaire was designed to include questions regarding some sociodemographic characteristics and the General Health Questionnair...

The aim of this analysis was to examine data from a general population sample for any retest effects in the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. A core panel was drawn from the British Household Panel Survey (n = 4749) of those who had completed the GHQ-12 seven times from 1991 to 1997. The panel results were compared with cross-sectional data from the Health Surveys for England for the same y...

The aim of this analysis was to examine data from a general population sample for any retest effects in the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. A core panel was drawn from the British Household Panel Survey (n = 4749) of those who had completed the GHQ-12 seven times from 1991 to 1997. The panel results were compared with cross-sectional data from the Health Surveys for England for the same y...

BACKGROUND Invariant item ordering (IIO) is defined as the extent to which items have the same ordering (in terms of item difficulty/severity - i.e. demonstrating whether items are difficult [rare] or less difficult [common]) for each respondent who completes a scale. IIO is therefore crucial for establishing a scale hierarchy that is replicable across samples, but no research has demonstrated ...

BACKGROUND Little is known about psychological risk factors in cerebrovascular disease. We examined the association between psychological distress and risk of death due to cerebrovascular disease. METHODS We obtained data from 68 652 adult participants of the Health Survey for England (mean age 54.9 [standard deviation 13.9] yr, 45.0% male sex) with no known history of cardiovascular diseases...

BACKGROUND Measurement equivalence is an essential prerequisite for making valid comparisons in mental health questionnaires across groups. In most methods used for assessing measurement equivalence, which is known as Differential Item Functioning (DIF), latent variables are assumed to be continuous. OBJECTIVE To compare a new method called Latent Class Regression (LCR) designed for discrete ...