Premium
On the validity of the Middlesex Hospital Questionnaire: A comparison of diagnostic self‐ratings in psychiatric out‐patients, general practice patients, and ‘normals’ based on the Hebrew version
Author(s) -
Dasberg Haim,
Shalif Ilan
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
british journal of medical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.102
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 2044-8341
pISSN - 0007-1129
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8341.1978.tb02473.x
Subject(s) - neuroticism , psychology , guttman scale , clinical psychology , psychiatry , criterion validity , rating scale , psychosocial , construct validity , test validity , hebrew , scale (ratio) , psychometrics , personality , developmental psychology , social psychology , linguistics , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
The short clinical diagnostic self‐rating scale for psycho‐neurotic patients (The Middlesex Hospital Questionnaire) was translated into everyday Hebrew and tested on 216 subjects for: (1) concurrent validity with clinical diagnoses; (2) discriminatory validity on a psychoneurotic gradient of psychiatric out‐patients, general practice patients, and normal controls; (3) validity of subscales and discrete items using matrices of Spearman rank correlation coefficients; (4) construct validity using Guttman's smallest space analysis based on coefficients of similarity. The Hebrew MHQ was found to retain its validity and to be easily applicable in waiting‐room situations. It is a useful method for generating and substantiating hypotheses on psychosomatic and psychosocial interrelationships. The MHQ seems to enable the expression of the ‘neurotic load’ of a general practice subpopulation as a centile on a scale, thereby corroborating previous epidemiological findings on the high prevalence of neurotic illness in general practice. There is reason to believe that the MHQ is a valid instrument for the analysis of symptom profiles of subjects involved in future drug trials.