The Assessment of a New Scale for Measuring Mental Health

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Abstract

This paper is about two separate researches on the development of a new scale for measuring positive and negative mental health. In first research, 554 subjects who were randomly selected from Yazd university students, answered to five questionnaires that measured mental illness and mental well-being. the sum of items of these five tools were 174. Factor analysis was used for these data for obtaining two factor.46 items that had suitable correlation with two factors and their content were congruent with mental illness and mental well-being selected from the 174 were about the items and were named positive and negative mental health. 23 items were about the positive and the other 23 items were related the negative mental health. In second study, a new tool was used for 117 personnel's of Yazd University. New scale along with two other valid scales for measuring well being and mental illness were administered to the personnel. The results showed that new scale had good validity and reliability. Reliability coefficient was 0.90. Both Convergent validity and discriminate validity were good. In addition, factorial validity for the two factors in the new sample was suitable. Results were discussed with regard to the new theories in mental health.

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