The College Student Mental Health Scale: Revision, Reliability, And Validity

Objective:Recently,the college students mental health has been paid more attention.But most scales be used came from abroad, and weren't applicable for college students.Therefor,it was very important to develop a mental health scale for using in college students. This study based on WangXin's study,it's aim is to: (1) explore the intra-structure of college student mental health;(2)revise the Comprehensive College Student Mental Health Scale,and develop a new Mental Health Scale for using in college student;(3)examine the reliability and validity of the scale.Methods:Taking 1038 college students(667 females,371 males) from three representative universities of Shijiazhuang by whole group.Exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic approaches were used to develop and evaluate the intra-structure of the scale.The reliability analysis included Cronbach's a ,split-half reliability,and test-retest reliability.The validity analysis included content,construct,and criterion-related validity.Results:(1)Using item analysis and exploratory factor analysis,54 items are included in the scale.(2)Exploratory principal component analysis of the items indentified that the scale had nine factors,explaining 52.88% of the total variance.Nine factors was labeled as follows:Somatization, Self-esteem, Depression, Aim, Interpersonal relationship, Sleep, Anxiety, Tired-ness, Obsessive.(3)Internal consistency analysis showed that the Cronbach's a coefficient,split-half and test-retest correlation coefficients ranged from 0.61 to 0.86,0.60 to 0.85, 0.63-0.85 respectively for each factor,and were 0.95,0.93 ,0.83 respectively for the total scale.(4)Inter-scale correlations studies showed that the correlations between items and total scores ranged from 0.39 to 0.64,the correlations among nine factors ranged form 0.24 to 0.63,the correlations between each factors and total scores ranged from 0.60 to 0.80. All correlations were significant(P<0.01).(5)Confirmatory factor analysis were conducted to assess the measurement of factor structure of the scale.The results supported nine-factor model of the scale.(6)Sex difference studies showed that the scores of Somatization .Anxiety in male college students were significantly higher than those in female college students.Significant higher score of Depression was found in female college students than those in male college students.(7)One-child difference studies showed that the scores of Sleep, Anxiety, Obsessive andwhole scale in only-child were significantly lower than those in multi-child.(8)Family income difference studies showed that the scores of Eelf-esteem,Depression,Sleep, Obsessive and whole scale in low family income students were significantly higher than those in high family income students.Conclusions:(1) The study finished developing the structure of college student mental health scale,and confirmatory factor analysis studies showed the structure of the scale is pretty reasonable.(2)Psychometic properteis analysis showed that the scale achieved good to excellent levels of internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and content, construct, and criterion-related validity.