Abstract

This study purposed to standardize the Korean versions of the General Health Questionnaire, especially KGHQ-20 and KGHQ-30, through the evaluation of their reliability and validity. The two KGHQs, along with several other scales that measure psychological symptoms, were administered to 916 students and 102 chronically mentally ill patients at mental health hospitals in Korea. Both of the KGHQs were found to have high reliability based on test-retest correlation coefficients, internal consistency (Chronbach's ${\alpha}$) as scales, and item-total correlations for most of the items. The two KGHQ scores were shown to have high validity based on three methods of analysis; first, both KGHQ scores had highly significant correlations with most of other measures for psychopathology, such as SCL-90, CES-D, SDS, BAI, STAI; second, there were significant differences of the two KGHQ scores between the group of mentally healthy students and the group of chronically mentally ill patients; the validity of the KGHQ-30 was also derived from high sensitivity and specificity, which helped identify the best cut-off points: 15/16 for the KGHQ-30. The cut-off point for the KGHQ-20 was determined at 12/13 based on the mean scores and standard deviations of other scales as well as of the KGHQ-20.

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