the reliability of the twelve-item general health questionnaire (ghq-12) under realistic assumptionstwelve-item一般健康问卷的可靠性(ghq-12)现实的假设.pdfVIP

BMC Public Health BioMed Central Research article Open Access The reliability of the twelve-item general health questionnaire (GHQ-12) under realistic assumptions Matthew Hankins1,2,3 Address: 1Kings College London, Department of Psychology (at Guys), Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK, 2Department of Primary Care Public Health, Brighton Sussex Medical School, Brighton, UK and 3Brighton Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton, UK Email: Matthew Hankins - matthew.hankins@kcl.ac.uk Published: 14 October 2008 Received: 11 February 2008 Accepted: 14 October 2008 BMC Public Health 2008, 8:355 doi:10.1186/1471-2458-8-355 This article is available from: /1471-2458/8/355 © 2008 Hankins; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The twelve-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) was developed to screen for non-specific psychiatric morbidity. It has been widely validated and found to be reliable. These validation studies have assumed that the GHQ-12 is one-dimensional and free of response bias, but recent evidence suggests that neither of these assumptions may be correct, threatening its utility as a screening instrument. Further uncertainty arises because of the multiplicity of scoring